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k 



THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 




The fifteenth-century church of Saint-Medard. It was here that, in 
Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," Jean Valjean, with Cosette, recognized in 
the sidewalk beggar his relentless pursuer, Javert, and began his epic flight, 
which ended in the Convent of the Little Picpus. 



THE PARIS OF 
THE NOVELISTS 

BY 

ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE 

Author of "The New York of the Novelists," 

"Fifth Avenue," "Bottled Up 

In Belgium," etc. 




GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
1919 



.Mf 



COPYRIGHT, I919, BY 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OP 

TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, 

INCLUDING THB SCANDINAVIAN 



caai 1919 



©CI.A536.S81 



PART I 

PAGE 

I. THE TRANSATLANTIC JOURNEY IN 

FICTION • 3 

The Point of Departure— The Transatlantic 
Trip in Fiction— The Smoking Room in 
"Captains Courageous"— "Their Silver 
Wedding Journey "—Tales of Romance and 
Intrigue— The Suggestion of the Horizon— 
McAndrew's Point of View— Gateways of 
Approach— The English Countryside— Along 
the Southerly Route— The Road Through 
the Lowlands— The Pilgrim's Personal Mem- 
ories. 

11. THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO . . 13 
The Astonishing Hugo— The Publication of 
"Les Miserables"— The Rue de CHchy, 
Hugo's First Paris Home— Associations of 
the Southern Bank— Hugo^s Marriage— 
" Hemani "— " Han d'Islande "— " Bug-Jar- 
gal"_The Writing of "Notre Dame"— The 
Place des Vosges Residence— The Trail of 
Esmeralda— The Source of "Les Miserables'* 
—The Flight of Jean Valjean and the Pursuit 
of Javert. 



vi CONTENTS 

PAGE 

III. THE PARIS OF THACKERAY AND 

DICKENS 28 

"The Ballad of the Bouillabaisse" — Terre's 
Tavern — "A Caution to Travellers " — Thack- 
eray as Art Student and Correspondent — 
The Early Married Life — Mrs. Brookfield — 
The Paris of "Vanity Fair," "The New- 
comes,"-^ and "The Adventures of Philip" — 
The Paris of Dickens's "ATale of Two Cities" 
— Dickens's Days in Paris. 

iV. ' THE TRAIL OF THE MUSKETEERS 

AND OTHERS 45 

The Personal Alexandre Dumas — ^The 
"Novel Manufactury" — From Villers-Cot- 
terets to Paris — Early Paris Homes — The 
Chateau of Monte Cristo — Dumas's Death at 
Dieppe — The City of the Valois — The Streets 
of the Musketeers. 

V. THE PARIS OF HONORfi DE BALZAC . 60 
The Paris of Opening Paragraphs — ^The Rue 
Lesdiguieres — The Happily Forgotten Novels 
— Balzac as Law Student and Publisher — In 
the Rue Visconti — The Secret of Achievement 
— ^The "Hotel des Haricots" — The Hidden 
Chambers — "Les Jardies" — The "Maison 
Vauquer" — The Faubourg Saint-Germain 
— ^The Rue du Doyenne — The Haunts of 
Cesar Birotteau. 



CONTENTS vii 

PAGE 

VI. SINISTER STREETS 76 

Slums of Paris — Ancient Streets — The Old 
Cite of "Les Mysteres de Paris"— The Per- 
sonal Eugene Sue — "Les Mysteres," and 
"Le Juif Errant" as Serials — The Under- 
world of 1840 — Caverns in the Cours la 
Reine — Paul de Kock — His Amazing Popu- 
larity — The Tribute of Major Pendennis — 
The Paris of Emile Gaboriau. 

VII. ABOUT PARIS WITH ALPHONSE 
DAUDET 92 

The Rue MoufFetard — Daudet's First Im- 
pressions of Paris — In the Latin Quarter 
and the Marais — Scenes of **Sapho" — "Les 
Rois en Exil" — The Genesis of the Story — 
The Rue Monsieur le Prince — In the Paris 
Ghetto — Originals of the Daudet Charac- 
ters. 

VIII. BOHEMIAN TRAILS 107 

The Migration of Bohemia — "La Vie de 
Boheme" and "Trilby" — Henry Murger 

and his Contemporaries — Youth and-Age — A 
Bohemian's Expense Book of the Forties — 
"Trilby"— The Studio in the Place St. Ana- 
tole des Arts — Du Maurier and Henry James 
— Du Maurier in Paris and Antwerp — Trails 
of the "Musketeers of the Brush" — Origi- 
nals of the Characters. 



viii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

IX. SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 124 
The Lesson of Laurence Sterne — ^The France^ 

of Kipling's "The Light That Failed"— The 
Trail of Stevenson — "R. L. S." in Paris, 
Fontainebleau, and Grez — Conan Doyle's 
Sherlock Holmes and Brigadier Gerard — 
"The Refugees" — Leonard Merrick's Tri- 
cotrin and His Haunts — ^The Paris of Arnold 
Bennett — The Writing of "The Old Wives 
Tale"— W. J. Locke's "The Beloved Vaga- 
bond" and "Septimus" — Mr. Locke on His 
Own Characters. 

X. ZOLA'S PARIS 146 

NThe Bitter Years of Apprenticeship — The 

World Seen from a Garret — Employment 
at Hachette's — First Published Books — ^At 
Flaubert's Table — The Story of the House 
at Medan — Paris Streets and the Novels of 
the "Rougon-Macquart" — Dram Shops, 
Markets, and Department Stores. 

XL THE PARIS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT 163 
The Real Bel-Ami — ^The Key to the Charac- 
ters — Maupassant's Heritage and Training — 
The Years of Achievement — The Day's Work 
— ^The Valet, Fran9ois — ^The Gathering Shad- 
ows — The Downfall. 

Xn. THE PARIS OF SOME AMERICANS . 177 
Irving and Cooper — Poe's "The Mystery 



CONTENTS ix 

of Marie Koget," "The Purloined Letter," 
and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" — ^A 
Digression — Paris in the Books of Archibald 
Clavering Gunter, Marion Crawford and W. 
D. Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, 
Edith Wharton, Richard Harding Davis, 
Owen Johnson, Louis Joseph Vance, F. 
Berkeley Smith, Cleveland MofFett, Guy 
Wetmore Carryll — H. L. Wilson's "Ruggles 
of Red Gap" — Booth Tarkington's "The 
Guest of Quesnay," "The Beautiful Lady," 
and "His Own People" — Frank Norris in 
Paris — An O. Henry Paris Trail. 



PART II 
ABOUT RURAL FRANCE 

PAGE 

XIII. THE MAGIC OF THE SEINE . . . 197 
Between Paris Quais — The Parisian Afield — 
The Musketeers in the Environs — The River 

and Guy de Maupassant — Meudon and 
"Trilby "—The Trail of "Peter Ibbetson"— 
"Samuel Brohl et Cie" — Versailles — The 
Forest of Fontainebleau — Daudet's"Sapho" — 
Ville d'Avray, Chaville, and the Lake at En- 
ghien. 

XIV. CHIMES OF NORMANDY ... 209 
The Romance of Old Names — Calais and 
Thackeray's "Desseins" — Boulogne and 
"The Newcomes" — Conan Doyle's "Uncle 
Bernac" — Fecamp, Etretat, and Guy de 
Maupassant — The Real Maison Tellier — 
Havre, "Pierre et Jean," and Henry James's 
"Four Meetings" — Maupassant's Literary 
Creed — Balzac's "Modeste Mignon " — Sands 

of Trouville — Ouida's "Moths" — Tarking- 
ton's "The Guest of Quesnay" — The Kings 
of Yvetot — Mont Saint-Michel — Rouen and 



CONTENTS xi 

PAGE 

"Madame Bovary"— The Real Y.— The 
Style of Gustave Flaubert — ** Bel-Ami," and 
"Boule-de-Suif" — Merrick's "Conrad in 
Quest of His Youth." 

XV. A ROUNDABOUT CHAPTER . . - ." 227 
Carcassonne — The Land of the Fading Twi- , 
light— "Mademoiselle de Maupin"— "Ma- 

non Lescaut" — With Balzac in Touraine — 
The Home of Eugenie Grandet — The Coun- 
try of Scott's "Quentin Durward" — About 
France with the Comedie Humaine — Con- 
carneau, and Blanche Willis Howard's 
"Guenn" — Pierre Loti's*'Pecheurd'Islande" 
— Belle-Isle-en-Mer and the Death of Por- 
thos — Indret, and Daudet's "Jack." 

XVI. A PILGRIMAGE TO TARTARIN . . 241 
The Rails of the P. L. M.— At the "Emper- 
eurs" — Streets of Tarascon — ^The Baobab 
Villa — The Castle of King Rene — The Bridge 

to Beaucaire — The Writing of "Tartarin de 
Tarascon." 

XVII. MEDITERRANEAN WATERS . . 252 
Villemessant and Dante's Escape — The 
Magic of Marseilles — Conrad's "The Arrow 

of Gold"— Dickens's "Little Dorrit"— Dau- 
det's "Tartarin" and "Sapho"— R. H. Davis 
and Marseilles — The Shadow of "Monte 
Cristo" — The Cannebiere and the Catalans 



xii CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Quarter — The Chateau d'lf and Its Story — 
The Island of Monte Cristo — The Real Ed- 
mond Dantes — Maquet's Share in Writing 
"Monte Cristo" — ^Zola in Marseilles — ^Along 
the Riviera — De Maupassant and Cannes. 

XVIII. WHERE THE WALL OF STEEL 
HELD 266 

In Flanders Field — The Heritage of Disaster 
— The Fiction of the Young Republic — The 
Napoleonic Era — The War of 1870 — A Stev- 
ensonian Prophecy — ^The Great Conflict. 

XIX. THE OLD-WORLD OPEN ROAD . . 273 
The Trail of the Musketeers — ^The Journey 

to England — Seventeenth-century Inn 
Names — Crossing the Channel — Old-World 
Hostelries — Wine and Water — Proverbs for 
Travellers — The Cost of Travel. 

XX. MY OLD EUROPE 281 

INDEX 29s 



FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Fifteenth-century Church of St. Medard 

Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

Old Paris from Notre Dame 22 

The Old Pont Neuf 72 

Paris Was Born in the Isle of the Seine ... 88 

The Morgue 120 

The Rue du Haut Pave, Looking Toward the 

Pantheon 136 

**Most of the Streets Were very Narrow and Had 

no Sidewalks" 202 

The Vieux Port of Marseilles 254 



ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT 



FAGS 



The Passage des Patriarches. A Bit of Old Paris 
Skirted by Jean Valjean and Cosette in the 
Flight from Javert. Victor Hugo's "Les 
Miserables" 26 

The Rue St. Dominique of the Old Faubourg St. 
Germain. In This Street Was the Hotel 
de Florae of Thackeray's "The Newcomes" 37 

Courtyard of the Conciergerie. Whence Sidney 
Carton Went to Execution. Dickens's "A 
Tale of Two Cities " 42 

Meung. Where D'Artagnan First Came upon 



XUl 



xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

the Scene of Fiction. Dumas's "The Three 
Musketeers" 48 

D'Artagnan's Lodging in the Rue Tiquetonne. 

Dumas's "Twenty Years After" .... 58 

The Rue Visconti. Where Honore de Balzac 
Estabhshed the Printing Press That Ruined 
Him 63 

The Maison Vauquer. Where Pere Goriot Lived 
and Died, and Trompe-la-Mort Plotted. 
The Rue Neuve Sainte-Genevieve Is Now the 
Rue Tournefort. Balzac's "Pere Goriot" . 68 

A Sinister Street of Old Paris. Sue's "The 

Mysteries of Paris " 76 

The Rue de Venise. A Quaint, Old World Pas- 
sage Still to Be Found Near the Halles 
Centrales 78 

The Old Temple Market. Sue's "The Mys- 
teries of Paris" 84 

The Old Mont Sainte-Genevieve. Crested by 
the Church That Links the Present and the 
Romantic Past 92 

A Montmartre Street of R. L. Stevenson's "New 
Arabian Nights," and Leonard Merrick's 
"Tricotrin Stories'* 128 

The Old Rue St. Martin. Conan Doyle's "The 

Refugees" 134 

The Genealogical Tree of Zola's Rougon-Mac- 

quart Family 155 

The Cabaret of the Assassins. An Outpost of the 
City of Naples of Montmartre. Zola's 
"L'Argent" 156 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv 



PAGE 



Approaching the Basilique du Sacre-Coeur . . 157 
The Pare Monceau. A Favourite Setting of Guy 

de Maupassant 165 

A Map Indicating the Invasion of France by 

Certain EngUsh and American Works of 

Fiction 178 

The Ancient Norman Mount of St. Michel. 

Maupassant's "Notre Coeur" 209 

The Seine at Rouen. Flaubert's "Madame 

Bovary" 220 

Ry, the "Y" of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" 223 

The Walls of Carcassonne 227 

The Old Auberge du Cheval Blanc. Abbe Pre- 

vost's "Manon Lescaut" 229 

The Chateau de Velors, the Home of Balzac's 

Eugenie Grandet 233 

A Map Indicating the Rural France of Balzac's 

"Comedie Humaine" 237 

King Rene's Castle. Where the "Montenegrin 

Prince" Was a Guest of the State. Daudet's 

"Tartarin of Tarascon'* 241 

The Rhone Bridge from Tarascon to Beaucaire, 

Over Which Tartarin Went to Exile. Daudet's 

"Port Tarascon" 248 

The Chateau d'lf, from Which Edmond Dantes 

Escaped in the Shroud of the Abbe Faria. 

Dumas's "The Count of Monte Cristo . . 252 



INTRODUCTION 

YESTERDAY there was a familiar and much- 
hackneyed saying to the effect that all good 
Americans go to Paris when they die. To-day 
it does not come so readily to the lips. Somehow, about 
it, there is a flippant, even a jarring, note. Yesterday, 
for most of us, the city by the Seine stood for the light- 
ness and the gaiety of life, for the glitter of spacious 
boulevards, for the splendour of open spaces, for the 
beauty of monuments. The *' pleasant land of France" 
as a whole meant the plages of Trouville or Deauville, 
quaint fishing villages of Brittany, largely populated 
by aspiring painters in striking raiment who spoke 
French with a delicious, mid-western nasal twang, the 
chateaux of Touraine, the rich vineyards of the Cote d*Or, 
symbol of the "imprisoned laughter of the peasant girls 
of France," the semi-tropical warmth of the Riviera. 
It is to a different Paris, and a France which Paris rep- 
resents, but which must never be wholly judged by 
Paris, that the eyes of millions of Americans are turned 
to-day. 

Above all. It is the stones of France that, to our coun- 
trymen and countrywomen, are taking on a new mean- 
ing. We understand better now the stately Pantheon 
that crowns the Mont de Paris. Aux grands hommes 
la patrie reconnaissante. No longer will the great ceme- 

xvii 



xvlii INTRODUCTION 

I. 

tarles of Montmartre and of Pere Lachaise be merely 
spectacles. Too close to our hearts are thousands of 
simple mounds, that, peasant tended, stretch from the 
Flemish lowlands to the Vosges mountains, along the 
line where the Wall of Steel held. With newly awakened 
eyes we are beholding France's mighty past. The 
centuries that are gone now have their significance. 
Yesterday Reims was a city unknown in the United 
States save to the travelled few. To-day, there is 
hardly a village between the Atlantic and the Pacific 
that does not thrill to the name. 

It was the writer's privilege to be in the French 
Senate the day of the formal announcement of the 
entrance of the United States into the World War, 
and later to witness the arrival of the advance guard 
of that vast army from across the sea that was to be 
such a factor in the turning of the tide. Subsequently, 
he has seen the new spirit reflected in scores of soldiers' 
letters. That spirit has been one to put to shame the 
old frivolity, the old inadequate appreciation or even 
recognition of the things that are vital and that endure. 
Face to face with the Great Adventure, thousands of 
those boys turned to the stones of France for the story 
and interpretation of her civilization, her history, her 
literature, and her art. Their footsteps are likely to be 
followed by the tens of thousands of mothers and fathers 
and sisters who will make the pilgrimage in the years 
to come. 

It is an unwieldy past that formal history, at best, 
presents. The essence, the colour, the romance of the 
world that is gone have ever been best interpreted by 



INTRODUCTION xix 

those who have tempered often disputed fact by the 
play of constructive imagination. It is Shakespeare's 
England that we know, and not the England of the 
titled statesmen who occasionally condescended to 
applaud his plays in the old Globe Theatre on the banks 
of the Thames. It is with the eyes of Wilfred of 
Ivanhoe, of Cedric, of Wamba the Jester, that we see 
Sherwood Forest, and the antagonism between Norman 
and Saxon in the days when Prince John coveted the 
throne of the absent Richard of the Lion Heart. Which 
is the real D'Artagnan: the shabby adventurer who 
actually lived and wrote a book of sordid memoirs, 
which apparently nobody but Thackeray ever read, or 
the man that Dumas created to the delight of millions, 
splendid in his hot youth, finer at his ripe maturity, 
and best of all as the grizzled veteran who kidnapped 
Monk and rode to Belle-Isle ? To turn to our own land 
and history. Parkman has written learnedly and enter- 
tainingly of the Indian of Colonial days. But it is 
through the pages of Fenimore Cooper's fancy that the 
figure of the Redskin has become a heritage of Ameri- 
can youth. Does thunder in the Catskill Mountains 
suggest some petty village politician of the Dutch 
burgher days, or Rip van Winkle going to his twenty 
years' sleep, and the ghostly gnome-like men of Hendrik 
Hudson at their game of bowls ? 

To illustrate by contrasting the figures of history 
and fiction of more modern times. In a London street 
it is a matter of little or no interest to the writer that a 
certain house was once the home of the last Mayor of 
Peterborough before the passage of the Reform Bill. 



XX INTRODUCTION 

It is a matter of great interest if it happens to be the 
structure where Mrs. Rawdon Crawley {nee Miss Re- 
becca Sharp) lived on "nothing a year.'* The one 
dominant impression of the Charterhouse will ever be 
of Colonel "Tom" Newcome answering "Adsum" when 
his name was called, and standing in the presence of his 
master. There are certain men and women of fiction 
who are real and material, whereas those who actually 
had a brief existence on this earth are but dust. Their 
names have crept into our daily talk. It is enough to 
say: "He is a Pecksniff,'* or "a TartufFe," or "a Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." 

No city and no land is so rich in literary shrines as 
are the city and land with which this volume has to do. 
There is hardly a street of the Paris of the present, or 
of the Paris that is gone but which still lives, that is not 
reflected in the pages of the imaginative writers of 
France. Across the city of 1830 lay the shadow of 
Balzac. That memory alone is enough to people the 
houses with a hundred vivid types. The greatest 
setting of the scene in all his books, the Maison Vauquer 
of "Le Pere Goriot," is still to be found, practically 
unchanged since the day when "Trompe-la-mort" 
tempted Rastignac in its garden. The towers of Notre 
Dame are much the same as when the hunchback 
Quasimodo looked down from them on the labyrinth 
of streets below. The Little Picpus was the refuge 
of Jean Valjean after his flight from Javert. Through 
the Marais one may track the people of Alphonse Dau- 
det's "Fromont et Risler." A vivid fancy will serve 
to identify the very windows of the study of Anatole 



INTRODUCTION xxl 

France's Sylvestre Bonnard. There is no need to stir 
from the boulevards to find the men and women who 
peopled the pages of Guy de Maupassant. 

This book has been in mind and in hand for many 
years. The writer first saw France as a boy of eight. 
He was there many times in the course of the impres- 
sionable teens. It was when he was in the early twen- 
ties that the literary associations began to take hold of 
him, when he first found a delight in tramping from 
street to street, trying to reconstruct Paris as it was 
when the King's Musketeers crossed swords with the 
Guards of the Cardinal; or hunting for the Cafe Momus 
of Murger's " Scenes de la Vie de Boheme," or the studio 
of Taffy, the Laird, and Little Billee of Mr. du Mau- 
rier's "Trilby." In later visits he has often ignored the 
Louvre, but there has always been found time for re- 
newed intimacy with the literary trail. Nor has it 
been a matter of Paris alone. Once, for example, 
enthusiasm for a certain delightful creation of Daudet 
carried him to Tarascon, thence to the wharves of 
Marseilles, and thence, by a French tramp steamer on 
which he was the only passenger, across the Mediter- 
ranean to Algeria in the pursuit of his beloved Tartarin. 
To the regions where the wall of steel held he was 
close in the terrible days when the guns were blazing 
death and the grip of the invader on the land had not 
yet been broken. The uniforms in thousands about him 
were of the Teuton field gray, for it was the German line 
that he was behind, his business there being as one of 
the American Commission for Relief in Belgium and the 
north of France. It was the one time when the literary 



xxli INTRODUCTION 

trail was little in mind. But in the years to come it is 
his ardent hope to see often again the Havre jetee, where 
Maupassant's Pierre and Jean sat in the darkness; the 
Chateau d'lf of the bay of Marseilles where Edmond 
Dantes beat his head against the dungeon wall; the 
Esplanade of Tarascon, where Tartarin told of his lion 
hunts and his ascent of the Jungfrau; and to wake in 
the morning to the hum of Paris going to work. Then, 
in the spirit in which Robert Louis Stevenson called to 
the shade of his adored D'Artagnan: he will say: "Come 
once more with Eugene de Rastignac to the heights of 
Pere Lachaise, and the challenge: ^A nous deuxy mainten- 
ant/' " That, frankly, is the spirit of the narrative : and if 
this book is of aid to one American reader in finding the 
trail and better understanding its charm it will not have 
been written in vain. 

Arthur Bartlett Maurice. 



PART I 

CONCERNING THE TRANSATLANTIC 
JOURNEY 



I. CONCERNING THE TRANSATLANTIC 
JOURNEY 

The Pointof Departure — The Transatlantic TripinFiction — The 
Smoking Room in "Captains Courageous" — ''Their Silver Wed- 
ding Journey" — Tales of Romance and Intrigue — The Suggestion 
of the Horizon — McAndretvs Point of View — Gateways of Ap- 
proach — The English Countryside — Along the Southerly Route — 
The Road through the Lowlands — The Pilgrim's Personal Mem- 
ories. 

THERE is no need to wait until the liner or the 
channel boat or the landing lighter scrapes the 
wharves of a French port, or the train stops 
for the custom-house examination at the French frontier, 
in order to greet the romance of fiction. No matter 
the method of approach selected, romance, if one has 
eyes to see it, lines the way. From the very moment 
of embarkation, when the clanging bell commands Im- 
periously the separation of those really about to travel 
from those who, with mingled emotions, are merely 
wishing them **God speed," fiction offers a wide choice 
of motives, ambitions, and companions. Perhaps 
your tastes are sedate and selfishly masculine, and the 
most enchanting spot on shipboard is a corner of the 
smoking room. In that case there is no better book 
to which to turn than Rudyard Kipling's "Captains 
Courageous," the first chapter of which presents the 

3 



4 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

finest picture of a transatlantic liner smoking room that 
has ever been shown in fiction, a picture containing so 
many vividly illuminating touches in so brief a space 
that one's instinctive and admiring comment is to the 
effect that nobody in the world but Kipling could have 
written it. 

But perhaps the point of view from which one re- 
gards life and European travel is one which holds too 
assiduous patronage of the smoking room and its grossly 
material joys in stern disfavour. Then there is, for 
example, Mr. Howells's "Their Silver Wedding Jour- 
ney." With a characteristic love of detail Mr. Howells 
has played about the transatlantic journey. First 
there was the trip to Hoboken for the preliminary visit 
to the Hanseatic boat the Colmannia, the long dis- 
cussions about the comparative merits of that vessel 
and the Norumbia, the weighing of problems of 
baggage and equipment, the amassing of maps and 
guide books. The Marches were deliberate and well- 
ordered people, and all this was the affair of a month. 
Even after the actual embarkation, one hundred pages 
or more were needed to convey them without serious 
mishap or exciting incident across the Atlantic, al- 
though twenty-five pages sufficed to return them to 
America. 

Perhaps it is the atmosphere of mystery, intrigue, 
deck-chair courtship that is desired. Casually one may 
offer the conventional novel of the George Barr Mc- 
Cutcheon type, with its elusive Princess of Graustark 
and its highly endowed though undeniably intrusive 
American hero, a kind of tale which O. Henry has 



THE TRANSATLANTIC JOURNEY 5 

parodied and vindicated in "Best Seller"; or the very 
charming "Princess AHne" of Richard Harding Davis; 
or the "Dr. Claudius" of F. Marion Crawford; or Fran- 
ces Hodgson Burnett's "The Shuttle," which told of 
the crossing of the Meridania and the adventures 
of Betty Vanderpoel and the red-headed second-class 
passenger; or a novel by C. N. and A. M. Williamson, 
"Lord Loveland Discovers America," for example; 
or "The False Faces" of Louis Joseph Vance; or the 
extremely amusing "Uncle Hyacinth" of Alfred Noyes, 
albeit the ship of that tale sailed from a South American 
and not a North American port; or "The Destroyer" 
of Burton Egbert Stevenson; or, to turn to the fiction 
of the past, to offer Dickens's "Martin Chuzzlewit" 
with its somewhat unflattering portraits of our country- 
men and countrywomen, or "The Virginians" of 
Thackeray, which showed in what manner Harry War- 
rington crossed from the New World to England on the 
Young Rachel in the year of grace 1756. This is, 
as the reader has already perceived, a decidedly ramb- 
ling chapter, in which no attempt is made at discrimi- 
nating tabulation. 

In the course of the transatlantic passage which may 
be a matter (the Pilgrim writes from personal experience) 
of anywhere from six days to eighteen, the horizon is 
dotted from time to time with craft that suggest a 
fiction of the sea that is even more invigorating. That 
ship, lurching strangely in the now placid waters of the 
Channel, may be the Judea of Joseph Conrad's 
"Youth," venturing unsteadily yet resolutely to her 
death. It may be the vessel of the three journalists 



6 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

of Kipling's "A Matter of Fact," the Rathmines 
from Cape Town, that has witnessed in South Atlantic 
waters the death of the sea serpent and the agony of 
its mate, "bhnd, white, and smeUing of musk." It 
may be a boat out of Gloucester of a James B. Connolly 
story; or the ship of William McFee's "Casuals of the 
Sea"; or a craft of the nautical romance of Frank T. 
Bullen, or CutclifFe Hyne, or Morgan Robertson, or 
Albert Sonnichsen, or even Clark Russell; or the 
haunted ship of the Marion Crawford ghost story, 
"Man Overboard"; or, at the beginning of the journey, 
the incoming Dimbula ("The Ship That Found Herself), 
crying "Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! Princes, Dukes, and 
Barons of the High Seas"; or if the white cliffs of 
Albion be very close at hand, a little vessel hailing from 
the Wapping Old Stairs of the yarns of W. W. Jacobs. 

But after all there is really little need to follow with 
screwed-up eyes, or through glasses difficult to focus, 
smudges of smoke on the skyline. Romance is nearer 
at hand if we are willing to accept the testimony of 
McAndrews, the "dour Scotch engineer" of the poem. 

Romance! Those first-class passengers tliey like It very well, 
Printed an' bound in little books; but why don't poets tell? 
I'm sick of all their quirks an' turns — the loves and doves they dream — 
Lord, send a man like Robbie Burns to sing the Song o' Steam! 

Suppose that on the road to France you have crossed 
the Atlantic by a line that makes Plymouth the first 
port of call. In the war-zone years it would have been 
Falmouth, incidentally the inspiration of the line: 
"Every prospect pleases, and only man is vile"; and 



THE TRANSATLANTIC JOURNEY 7 

there would have been long hours of delay in a dreadful 
wooden shed by the waterside, and rigid scrutiny by 
Scotland Yard and the mihtary authorities; and the 
vessel by which you had travelled, after a period of wise 
detention, would have made its way, by a circuitous 
journey consuming six or seven days, west of Ireland 
and north of the Orkneys to its home port of Rotter- 
dam. But the happier times of peace are being con- 
sidered. A tender deposits you and your baggage at 
the dock, and after a custom-house examination of the 
superficial, old-world England kind, you take your seat 
in the carriage for the seven-hour journey to London. 
At a certain point of that journey you take out the guide 
that shall have replaced the familiar red-bound books 
of other days, and thence derive a vast amount of more 
or less useful information. You learn that near by are 
the ruins of a fine abbey church of the twelfth century; 
that one mile from the junction is a new town, a creation 
of the Great Western Railway, with engineering works 
occupying an area of two hundred acres, and employing 
twelve thousand workmen; and that a town of 6,642 
inhabitants, a few miles farther on, is well known for 
Its corn and cheese markets, and possesses manufactures 
of cloth, churns, and condensed milk. 

Now it happens that in one of Rudyard Kipling's 
earlier stories, *'My Sunday at Home," there was 
emphasized the very scene to which allusion is made in 
the above quotation. An American physician is mak- 
ing the journey. He is essentially a practical man, and 
yet it is neither the cheese market nor the churn manu- 
factory that stirs his interest. "So this is the Tess 



8 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

country, "he says. "And over there, somewhere to the 
north, is Stonehenge, where she died. I don't wonder 
people write novels about a place like this." So on the 
journey from Plymouth to London it is worth while to 
take along as a companion the spirit of the American 
physician of " My Sunday at Home." He will point out 
on the way much that is not to be found in the conven- 
tional guide-book. Devonshire will be to him the land 
of Mr. Eden Phillpotts, and if he has a taste for lighter 
fiction he will peer out of the train window over the 
Tors for a glimpse of Conan Doyle's spectral Hound 
of the Baskervilles. Miles to the left and north, he 
will tell you, lies the Valley of the Doones, the scenes 
of the struggles between great John Ridd and the sinister 
Carver Doone. The fact that Bath lies in a certain 
direction will remind him of the wanderings of Henry 
Fielding's Tom Jones, and perhaps prompt him to en- 
quire whether you are addicted to lighter fiction, and if 
so, whether you have read Booth Tarkington's "Mon- 
sieur Beaucaire" and recall the scene in the Pump Room 
where the supposed barber emerges in all the splendour 
of a French Prince of the Blood Royal. Finally, as he 
takes leave of you in the Paddington Station, he may 
flippantly remark that it was from this very station that 
Sherlock Holmes and Watson started to investigate the 
mysterious disappearance of the favourite for the Wessex 
Cup as narrated in the story of "Silver Blaze." 

He is after the Pilgrim's heart — that American phy- 
sician of Kipling's "My Sunday at Home." Had the 
road led over the Sussex Downs his talk would have 
been of the scenes and people of " Rewards and Fairies," 



THE TRANSATLANTIC JOURNEY g 

and "Puck of Pook's Hill," and "An Habitation En- 
forced," or of characters of Dickens or Thackeray or 
Trollope, or of Conan Doyle's vigorous novel of Corin- 
thian England and the hard-faced men of the prize 
ring, "Rodney Stone." 

There is what is known as the southerly route. The 
Pilgrim confesses to great ignorance of, and little inter- 
est in, the history of the Azores. As these lines are being 
reread in manuscript the eyes of the civilized world are 
on the islands, for there men of the United States Navy 
are making aerial history. But the sight of Ponta 
Delgada is certain to stir him to chuckling memory of 
the dinner described in Mark Twain's "The Innocents 
Abroad"; the repast at the end of which the astonished 
and embarrassed American voyagers were confronted 
with a bill reaching startling figures in mysterious 
milreis. Eight hundred miles more, and on the left 
rises the rock of Gibraltar, and on the right, across the 
strait, Tangier lying white in the sunshine. At the 
rock the mighty Tartarin was landed a prisoner after 
the disastrous attempt to colonize Port Tarascon; and 
the narrov/, climbing streets of Tangier played a part 
in the tales of A. J. Dawson's "African Nights Enter- 
tainment," and were the scenes of Richard Harding 
Davis's "The Exiles," and "The King's Jackal." If 
the line be one that the Pilgrim has for the moment 
affectionately in mind, the ship's course will lead first 
to a Sicilian port, reminiscent of novels old and new, 
and of the poem beginning: "King Robert of Sicily, 
brother of Pope Urbain, and Valmond, Emperor of 
Allmayne"; thence to the Bay of Naples, where low- 



10 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

lying Pompeii recalls the most famous of all the Bulwer- 
Lytton stories; then past Corsica and the Island of 
Monte Cristo from which the romance of Alexandre 
Dumas drew its title; and finally into the harbour of 
Marseilles, rich in swarming life and rich in fiction. 

Suppose the route is not the southerly route, nor the 
route direct to France, nor one of the several routes 
that carry through England or Scotland, but a route 
that has at the end of its sea journey the port of Rotter- 
dam or the port of Antwerp. With the Hfe of Holland 
the works of Maarten Maartens and of Louis Couperus 
have made many American readers recently familiar. 
But, with the exception of the name of Maeterlinck, 
for the spirit of the Lowlands, from the North Sea to the 
French frontier, it is the very unusual American who 
turns to books of Dutch or Belgian origin. It is the 
land of Charles Reade's *'The Cloister and the Hearth," 
with its gorgeous pictures of the men, women, and 
manners of the Middle Ages. It is the land of Ouida's 
(otherwise Louise de la Ramee's) "A Dog of Flanders," 
and **Two Little Wooden Shoes." It is the land of 
**La Tuhpe Noire" of Dumas. It is the land of those 
stupendous chapters of "Les Miserables" in which 
Victor Hugo pictured the Battle of Waterloo. It is the 
land that Henry Esmond visited to find his mother's 
grave. Above all, it is the land invaded by a timid little 
English girl of Russell Square whose fate was somehow 
bound up in the sweep and rush of the imperial eagles. 

A memory frankly intimate. Two years ago, measur- 
ing time from the moment that these lines are being 
written, the Pilgrim was behind the German battle 



THE TRANSATLANTIC JOURNEY ii 

lines as a member of the American Commission for 
Relief in Belgium and the North of France. In the 
great house in the Avenue Louise, of Brussels, in which 
he was quartered there was a hbrary composed of many 
books in many languages indicating the cosmopolitan 
tastes of the owner of the house, who had fled before the 
tide of German invasion. Often, of nights, in the dim 
light, the Pilgrim would turn, in "Vanity Fair," to the 
pages dealing with Brussels. Perhaps the description 
would be of the Duchess of Richmond's ball the night 
before Waterloo; the moment when William Dobbin 
goes to George Osborne, flushed by drink, and whispers : 
"The enemy has crossed the Sambre. Our left is al- 
ready engaged, and we are to march in three hours." 
That day, very likely, the Pilgrim had climbed the 
actual staircase of the scene, that was crowded with 
Belgians heart-heavy at the fear of deportation, and 
lined by sullen-faced men in the green-gray of the 
Imperial German Empire. Or perhaps the eyes would 
be skimming the sentences telling how, through the 
open windows, came a dull, distant sound over the sun- 
lighted roofs to the southward, how: *'God defend us, 
it's cannon!" cried Mrs. Major O'Dowd, and how a 
thousand pale and anxious faces might be seen looking 
from other casements. Something would disturb the 
reading; a dull, distant sound of the present and not the 
past borne by the night wind; the echoes of the guns of 
a battle beside which Waterloo seems a border skirmish. 
There is the memory of one day of following the 
literary trail when the Pilgrim was not alone, but in 
company the most congenial and delightful for the pur- 



12 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

pose. It was a day very near the end, when the declara- 
tion of war by the United States was impending, and 
the fate of the Americans behind the German lines 
seemed to be hanging in the balance. That day the 
Pilgrim lunched at the American Legation in the Rue 
de Treves, and afterward, in company with the Minis- 
ter, started out to prowl among streets old and new. 
We sought the house where Byron had for a brief time 
lived, the structure that sheltered Hugo in political 
exile, and the one that sheltered Dumas in financial 
exile. At the threshold of the dwelling that Charlotte 
Bronte once inhabited we discussed *'Villette," and 
*'The Professor," and the demure Httle EngHshwoman's 
infatuation for M. Heger, and the unutterable boredom 
which the unresponsive professor of the Pensionnat de 
Demoiselles suffered in consequence. Approximately 
we placed the hotel where Lady Bareacres and her dia- 
monds were mocked by Rebecca Crawley of the baleful 
green eyes, and the street down which Jos Sedley 
clattered on horseback in his flight to Ghent. At the 
flower market in the Grand Place we pictured Emmy 
leaning proudly on her husband's arm, the awkward 
Dobbin dancing attendance, and the red-faced O'Dowd 
and his ridiculous but kind-hearted wife. For a few 
brief hours the green-gray uniforms of the invaders, 
and the Pickelhauben, and the flag of black, white, and 
red flying over the Palais de Justice were far away. 



11. THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 

The Astonishing Hugo — The Publication of " Les Miserables" — 
The Rue de Clichy, Hugo's First Paris Home — Associations of 
the Southern Bank — Hugo's Marriage — " Hernani" — "Hans 
d'Islande" — "Bug-JargaV — The Writing of "Notre Dame" 
■ — The Place des Fosges Residence — Exile — The Trail of Esmer- 
alda — The Source of "Les Miserahles" — The Flight of Jean 
Valfean and the Pursuit of ] avert. 

FOR the better comprehension of the extraordi- 
nary Paris of the novels of Victor Hugo it is worth 
while considering the thousand and one anecdotes 
that have come down to us, anecdotes perhaps rather 
trivial in themselves, but illuminating an egotism so 
colossal that at times it seems to border on insanity. 
There shall be no attempt to weigh the stories, nor to 
sift the authentic from the apocryphal. There are too 
many of them; coming from too many sources. They 
flood the memory, leaving an ineradicable impression 
that does not, however, in the least blind to the com- 
manding genius or the rich achievement. To indicate, 
as briefly as possible, the nature of these tales. 

Hugo surrounded, as usual, by a group of his adorers. 
The particular scene is of no importance. Discussion as 
to the most fitting way in which to commemorate his 
grandeur for posterity. A monument? It is not 
enough. A street renamed? Quite inadequate. A 

. 13 



14 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

boulevard? An entire quarter? Finally the daring 
suggestion: Why should not Paris herself be hence- 
forth known as "Hugo"? Without a smile the great 
man nods grave approval. "Who knows," he says; 
"perhaps it will come to that." An Englishman visit- 
ing Hugo with a letter of introduction, and with many 
courteous apologies venturing to suggest that in future 
editions the name "Tom Jim-Jack" be changed to a 
more probable designation. "What gives you the right 
to criticize a masterpiece?" "My admiration for it, 
and the fact that, being an Englishman myself, I know 
that the name you have chosen for your principal 
character is a name that is quite impossible." Then 
Hugo, drawing himself up to his full height and waving 
the visitor to the door: "Yes, you are an Englishman. 
But I — / am Victor Hugo"! The poet finding himself 
one day in a railway train in company with two English- 
women who spoke French. The fact that Hugo, despite 
his years of residence on English territory, the years 
of his exile in Jersey and Guernsey, did not know a word 
of English, leads to the suggestion that the condition 
must be inconvenient for travel in England. To which 
the great man replies: "When England wants to talk to 
me she will learn my language." It w^as Hugo himself 
who told that story, adding: "From their amazement 
at this answer it was evident that they did not know 
who I was." The Emperor of Brazil expressing a wish 
to meet the poet personally. Hugo saying: "I do not 
visit emperors," which resulted in Dom Pedro's courte- 
ous: "Let not that be an obstacle to our meeting. 
M. Victor Hugo has the advantage over me of age and 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 15 

superior genius. I, therefore, will visit him." Hugo's 
proposal when the Germans were besieging Paris that 
the issue rest on a personal encounter between him and 
the King of Prussia. *'We are both old. He is a 
powerful sovereign. I am a great poet. We are there- 
fore equal. Why should we not decide by single combat 
the quarrel which divides our two nations and thus 
spare many lives?" 

Adolphe Brisson, the son-in-law of Francisque Sar- 
cey, has written the story of how the Belgian, Lacroix, 
became the pubhsher of *'Les Miserables." It was in 
1 861, when Hugo was in exile, hving at Hauteville 
House. Lacroix, who had heard that the book had just 
been finished, vowed that he would have it, and wrote 
Hugo a lyric letter, declaring himself ready to accept 
any conditions, and adding: "Genius is not to be 
bargained with." After considerable negotiation La- 
croix was invited to the Channel island, where, after a 
business interview, he bound himself in writing to spend 
vast sums of which he had not a single penny. To 
quote Brisson: "Where should he find the 125,000 
francs to be paid on the delivery of the manuscript? 
How should he arrange with the publishers, Renduel 
and Gosselin, who had contracts giving them the right 
to exploit the first two volumes of *Les Miserables' ? 
And, if the Emperor should forbid the appearance of 
the work in France, what then? . . . As he was 
about finally to sign Lacroix was seized with a strange 
scruple. He saw, upon the table, a vast pile of black- 
ened sheets. It was the manuscript of the first two 
volumes. Only for a glance at the treasure! 'May 



i6 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

I examine a little?' The hand of Hugo — his Burgrave 
hand — fell heavily upon the sheets, and in a hard 
tone he said: 'No, it is impossible.' Then he added 
by way of pleasantry, though the hurt pride was 
discernible under the badi?iage: 'Suppose it is 
blank paper. I have put my name there. That 
suffices.'" 

A street that has changed less in the course of a 
hundred years than most Paris streets is the Rue de 
Clichy, which begins by the Trinite and runs north to 
the exterior boulevards. It is a thoroughfare familiar to 
many thousands of Americans as the home of a number 
of pensions that have catered to English-speaking visi- 
tors in Paris. In the Rue de Clichy, at No. 24, was 
the first Paris home of Victor Hugo. The house, hke 
most of those in which the poet spent his early days, has 
been entirely destroyed, and its site is now part of the 
square surrounding the Trinite church. It was the 
first place of residence of which Hugo had any distinct 
recollection. To the end of his days he retained the 
impression of a goat in the courtyard, of a well overhung 
by a weeping willow, and of a cattle-trough near the 
well. Then there was a move to the southern bank 
of the river, to No. 12 Impasse des Feuillantines, an 
isolated mansion with a big garden and fine trees. 
There is a Rue des Feuillantines not far from the Luxem- 
bourg Garden in the Paris of to-day, but Victorien 
Sardou has written: "Through these gardens, through 
these silent streets so propitious to quiet labour, and 
scenting of lilacs and blossoming with pink and white 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 17 

chestnuts, new roads have been cut: the Saint-Germain 
and Saint-Michel boulevards, the Rue de Rennes and 
Gay-Lussac, the Rue Monge which caused the demoH- 
tion of the rustic cottage where Pascal died in the Rue 
Saint-Etienne itself; and the Rue Claude-Bernard, which 
did away with the Feuillantines, where Victor Hugo, 
as a child, used to chase butterflies/* The American, 
Benjamin Ellis Martin, recorded, twenty years ago; 
"By a curious coincidence, at No. 12 Rue des Feuil- 
lantines — which must not be confused, as it is often 
confused, with the Impasse of the same name — there 
stands just such an old house, in the midst of just 
such gardens, shaded by just such old trees, as 
Hugo describes in the pathetic reminiscences of his 
youth." 

Then there was a migration of a mile to the west to the 
still-existing Rue du Cherche-Midi, which may be in- 
dicated by its proximity to the Conseil-de-Guerre, or 
better still, as being within a block of the great depart- 
ment store, dear to the hearts of American shoppers, 
known as the "Bon Marche." All this time Victor's 
father, General Hugo, had been with the French 
armies of occupation in Spain. He made a brief ap- 
pearance on the scene during the Hundred Days, but 
his children seem to have been entirely under the influ- 
ence of their Bourbon-loving mother, and one of Victor's 
first literary effusions was a denunciation of Napoleon 
Bonaparte as a tyrant usurper, written a few days after 
Waterloo, when the boy was in his fourteenth year. 
After a short period at a boarding school in the Rue 
Sainte-Marguerite Victor entered the Lycee Louis-le- 



i8 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Grand, which then stood — as it stands now, though the 
structure has been rebuilt — facing the Rue Saint- 
Jacques, between the Sorbonne and the Pantheon. In 
1818, when Victor was writing **Bug-Jargal," Madame 
Hugo removed to the neighbourhood of the Institute 
of France, to a house in the Rue des Vieux-Augustins, 
long since torn down, its site now a part of the court- 
yard of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Three years later 
a change was made to No. 10 Rue des Mezieres, which, 
in its present form, runs from the Rue de Rennes to the 
Rue Bonaparte. About this time Victor began to 
cause some stir in the world. Chateaubriand sent for 
him and was supposed to have dubbed him "The Sub- 
lime Child"; and Lamartine described him as *'a studi- 
ous youth, with a fine, massive head, intelligent and 
thoughtful" — a man "whose pen can now charm or 
terrify the world." 

Madame Hugo died; Victor proposed marriage, form- 
ally, to Adele Foucher, and was accepted; he fought a 
duel with a guardsman and was wounded in the arm; 
he went to live on the top floor of No. 30 Rue du 
Dragon, near Saint-Germain-des-Pres, existing on 700 
francs a year, an experience which he was later to de- 
scribe in connection with Marius of "Les Miserables." 
Then he and Adele were married, and the young couple 
went to live, first in the Rue du Cherche-Midi, and 
later at No. 90 Rue de Vaugirard. In the latter house 
"Han d'Islande" was written, and the immature 
"Bug-Jargal " rewritten. A more commodious residence 
was found in 1828 in the Rue Notre Dame des Champs, 
and there they remained until the success of "Hernani" 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 19 

brought so many noisy admirers to the door that the 
landlady informed the Hugos that their presence had 
ceased to be desirable. With the exception of that first 
home in the Rue de Clichy, all of Victor Hugo's early 
residences are associated with a particular quarter of 
Paris. To follow the trail as well as it can be followed 
after the many years is a matter merely of a few 
hours. 

In 1 83 1 the Hugos crossed the river and went to live 
at No. 9 Rue Jean-Goujon, in the Champs-Elysees, 
then almost an outlying district. Hugo had contracted 
some time before with a publisher for "Notre Dame de 
Paris," but had failed to live up to his written agreement 
in the matter of time. A new understanding called for 
the delivery of the manuscript within five months. 
Hugo bought a great gray woolen wrapper that covered 
him from head to foot; locked up all his clothes, lest he 
should be tempted to go out; and, carrying off his ink 
bottle to his study, applied himself to his labour just as 
if he had been in prison. He never left the table except 
for food and sleep, and the sole recreation that he 
allowed himself was an hour's talk after dinner with 
some friend who might drop in, and to whom he oc- 
casionally read the pages that had been written during 
the day. As a result of the regime by which it was 
written he once thought of calling the story "What 
Came Out of a Bottle of Ink." Probably very few 
persons remember that about that time Hugo pro- 
jected a work that was never written, but which ap- 
parently was to have been a kind of sequel to "Notre 
Dame," for it was to have borne the title: "Le Fils de 



20 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

la Bossue," although the identity of the female hunch- 
back is a matter for conjecture. 

Then, in the autumn of 1832, the Hugos moved to 
the house which more than any other remains associated 
with the Hugo legend. It is the structure at No. 6 
Place des Vosges, now the Hugo Museum, where the 
poet lived from 1832 till 1848. Within these walls 
the romance of French history as well as the romance 
of French fiction has ever lurked. The use of the 
structure by Dumas as the home of the smister Milady 
of "The Three Guardsmen" belongs to another chapter. 
But Marion Delorme lived there, and De Vigny de- 
scribed it as it was in her time in his "Cinq-Mars." 
Both Dumas and De Vigny made use in fiction of their 
personal knowledge of the back entrance that still 
leads toward the Rue Saint-Antoine by way of the 
Impasse Guemenee. Actual use of it was made during 
the street fighting of the 1848 Revolution by National 
Guardsmen, who, bound from the Rue Saint-Antoine 
to head oflF the soldiers of Louis-PhiHppe in the square 
beyond, invaded Hugo's deserted apartment. The 
story is told that the leader of the band found some 
written sheets on the table, and read them aloud to his 
followers. It was the manuscript of "Les Miserables," 
just begun, but not finished until sixteen years later. 
There is another story connected with the apartment 
to the effect that Hugo, in his vanity, used to sit on a 
throne on a dais, under a canopy, and extend his hand 
to be kissed by his admirers. An absurd story; but not 
altogether an unnatural one. 

After Louis-Philippe lost his throne Victor Hugo 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 21 

went to live in the Rue d'lsly, and thence to the Rue de 
la Tour d'Auvergne. Then came the coup d'etaty and 
with it the exile that lasted until the power of the Third 
Napoleon was finally shattered at Sedan. In 1873 he 
occupied for a time a house at Auteuil, and then moved 
to an apartment at No. 66 Rue de la Rochefoucauld, a 
street that runs from the Rue Saint-Lazare to the Place 
Pigalle. Then chance took him to No. 21 Rue de 
Clichy, the very street where he had passed some of his 
early years, and close to the school where he had learned 
to read. No. 21 is on the west side of the street, at the 
corner of the Rue d'Athenes. From there, in 1878, 
he made his last removal, to the Avenue d'Eylau, re- 
named the Avenue Victor Hugo, one of the splendid 
thoroughfares that radiate from the Arc de Triomphe. 
The exact number was 130, and it was, and is, near the 
Bois de Boulogne. There is another monument of 
Paris associated with the memory of Victor Hugo; a 
monument that probably no American visiting Paris 
has failed to see. It is the Strasbourg Statue in the 
Place de la Concorde that for forty-seven years was 
decorated with the immortelles that were so triumph- 
antly removed on the nth of November, 191 8. The 
model for that statue, of which Pradier said that the ex- 
pression would change the moment that the lost Alsace 
was restored to France, was the Juliette Drouet who 
played such a conspicuous part in Hugo's private life. 

The Paris of the fiction of Victor Hugo is the Paris 
of two books, the fifteenth-century town of "Notre 
Dame" and the city of his youth that he had in mind 
when, in his Guernsey home, he was toihng on the great 



22 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

edifice of **Les Miserables." Of the former tale Robert 
Louis Stevenson has written: "We forget all that 
enumeration of palaces and churches and convents 
which occupies so many pages of admirable description, 
and the thoughtless reader might be inclined to conclude 
from this that they were pages thrown away; but this 
is not so: we forget indeed the details, as we forget or 
do not see the different layers of paint on a completed 
picture; but the thing desired has been accomplished, 
and we carry away with us a sense of the 'Gothic pro- 
file' of the city, of the 'surprising forest of pinnacles 
and towers and belfries,' and we know not of what rich 
and intricate and quaint. And throughout, Notre 
Dame has been held up over Paris by a height far 
greater than that of its twin towers: the Cathedral is 
present to us from the first page to the last; the title 
has given us the clew, and already In the Palais de 
Justice the story begins to attach Itself to that building 
by character after character. It is purely an effect 
of mirage. Hugo has peopled this Gothic city, and 
above all, this Gothic church, with a race of men even 
more distinctly Gothic than their surroundings." 

Stevenson's insistence on the Gothic aspect of the 
Paris of "Notre Dame" Is a direct reflection of Hugo 
himself, who felt, in penning the tale, that he should 
act as a kind of interpreting guide to the readers of his 
generation, and to that end wrote the chapter "A 
Bird's-Eye View of Paris," In which he reconstructed 
the old city of Quasimodo and Esmeralda. Of the 
fifteenth-century Paris he said: "It was not only a 
beautiful city; it was a uniform, consistent city, an 




Old Paris from Notre Dame. Dominant in French literature as in 
French history have been the Towers of Notre Dame. Balzac, Hugo, 
Dumas are among the giants who have described them. Of Hugo's novel 
bearing the old cathedral's name Stevenson has said: "What is Quasimodo 
but an animated gargoyle?" 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 23 

architectural and historic product of the Middle Ages, 
a chronicle in stone. It was a city formed of two 
strata only — the bastard Roman and the Gothic; for 
the pure Roman stratum had long since disappeared, 
except in the Baths of Julian, where it still broke 
through the thick crust of the Middle Ages. Gothic 
Paris was complete for an instant only. Since then the 
great city has grown daily and daily more deformed. 
Gothic Paris, which swallowed up the Paris of the bast- 
ard Roman period, vanished in its turn; but who can 
say what manner of Paris has replaced it?'* 

Dumas found — or, what is far more likely, one of his 
army of collaborators found, in the archives of the 
French secret police, the crude plot upon which *'The 
Count of Monte Cristo" was builded. To the same 
source Hugo owed the suggestion of "Les Miserables," 
for Jean Valjean, like Edmond Dantes, had an original 
in real life. The record of this man, whose name was 
Urbain Lemelle, was taken from the notes of M. 
Moreau-Christophe, the Chief Inspector of Prisons 
under Napoleon III. Like Jean Valjean, Lemelle was 
the abandoned child of a drunken father. In his early 
youth he was sheltered by a kind-hearted peasant, and 
six years of his life were passed in taking care of cows 
and sheep. At the age of fourteen he determined to 
become a sailor, and began as cabin boy on a boat from 
Angers. Three years later, for a trifling theft com- 
mitted at the instigation of a comrade, he was con- 
demned to seven years' penal servitude. 

During the term of his punishment Lemelle proved 
an exemplary prisoner — industrious, resigned, and re- 



24 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

ligious. After he had paid what he considered his 
debt to society, he returned to Angers, resolved to lead 
a worthy life. He found all doors closed against him; 
all employment denied him. One day, while roaming 
through the country, he stopped to rest in a field where 
there were horses at liberty. The idea entered his head 
to borrow a horse, ride to the seaport, thirty miles away, 
and embark for the New World, where he would be free 
to begin a new life. Without saddle or bridle he rode 
all night, reaching his destination in the early morning, 
and turning the horse loose before entering the town. 
In the town he was arrested on suspicion, but managed 
to escape, and made his way to Nantes, where he found 
that his lack of papers made it impossible for him to 
embark. He returned to Angers, was arrested for the 
theft of the horse, and sentenced to twelve years* penal 
servitude in Brest. At the end of four years he escaped, 
made his way to Paris, and there, by diligence, intelli- 
gence, and integrity, rose step by step to prosperity. 
He married and acquired a certain position. One 
Sunday, seven years after his marriage, he was walking 
with his wife in the suburbs of the city, when he was 
recognized by his Javert, a policeman who had been a 
former convict. Lemelle was denounced, arrested, and 
sent back to Brest to finish the eight years he still had 
to serve, in addition to supplementary years for the 
crime of escaping. After serving part of the sentence 
he was pardoned by Louis-Philippe, at the intercession 
of M. Moreau-Christophe, who had learned his story. 

Practically all of "Les Miserables" was written in the 
period of exile, after many years' absence from Paris. 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 25 

It was the Paris of his youth, the Paris which he had 
religiously carried away in his memory, the Paris of 
which he spoke as his ** mental birthplace" that he put 
into the story. But on memory alone he felt that he 
could not rely with a certainty of absolute accuracy, 
and so, in beginning those marvellous chapters describ- 
ing the flight of Jean Valjean and Cosette and the pur- 
suit by Javert and his men, he left a loop-hole by the use 
of the words: **It is possible that at the present day 
there is neither street nor house at the spot where the 
author proposes to lead the reader, saying: 'In such a 
street there is such a house/ If the readers like to take 
the trouble they can verify. As for him he does not 
know new Paris, and writes with old Paris before his 
eyes as an illusion v/hich is precious to him.'* 

The flight began in the neighbourhood of the Gobe- 
lins, which for three hundred years has been the state 
manufactory of the famous tapestry of the name. The 
Gorbeau house, which at first sight "seemed small as a 
cottage, but which in reality was as large as a cathe- 
dral," was just where Hugo placed it, on the site of 
Nos. 50 and 52 Boulevard de I'Hopital, almost directly 
opposite the Rue de la Barriere-des-Gobelins, now 
called the Rue Fagon. To find to-day the exact spot 
occupied by the old tenement, go to the little market 
place that is separated from the Place dTtalie by the 
Mairie of the XIII Arrondissement. While living in 
the Gorbeau house Jean Valjean usually went to Saint- 
Medard, which was the nearest church. Georges Cain, 
of the Carnavalet, has written of it as *' Gloomy, rat- 
gnawed, and poverty-stricken,"^ having left far behind 



26 



THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 



its days of miracles. Little changed, that church still 
stands near the northern end of the Avenue des Gobe- 
lins. Coming out of Saint-Medard one evening Jean 
Valjean gave alms to a beggar, and recognized the face 
of Javert. 

At different times the present Pilgrim has attempted 
to follow the subsequent trail. On one such occasion 

he was materially 
helped by notes of a 
similar search made by 
Benjamin Ellis Martin. 
That occasion was in 
the early summer of 
1917, and the changes 
that he found then 
were substantially the 
changes that Mr. 
Martin had recorded 
in an investigation of 
some eighteen or 
twenty years before. 
Taking a winding way 
to the Seine, through 
the deserted region be- 
tween the Jardin des 
Plantes and Val-de- 
Grace, Jean Valjean wisely doubled on his track. At 
one point he was almost in the shadow of the structure 
in which Balzac's Pere Goriot was perhaps living at 
the very moment. He described several labyrinths in 
the Quartier Mouffetard, which was as fast asleep as if it 




A STREET OF VALJEAN S FLIGHT 



THE PARIS OF VICTOR HUGO 27 

was still subject to mediaeval discipline and the yoke 
of the curfew. As the clock of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont 
struck eleven he passed the police station of the neigh- 
bourhood, which Hugo placed at No. 14 Rue de Pontoise, 
(a street that now crosses the Boulevard Saint-Germain) 
near its eastern end, but which Mr. Martin claims has 
always stood where it stands to-day, at No. 31 Rue de 
Poissy, the next parallel street. There, under the 
moonlight, Jean Valjean recognized Javert perfectly. 

Then, bent on putting the river between himself and 
his pursuers, Valjean made a long circuit around by 
the College Rollin, and by the lower streets skirting 
the Jardin des Plantes until he reached the quai. It 
is now the Quai Saint-Bernard, and the fleeing man fol- 
lowed it along the river bank to the present Place Val- 
hubert, where he crossed the Pont d'Austerlitz, and 
plunged into the maze of roads and lanes, lined with 
woodyards and walls, on the northern side of the Seine. 
Reaching a little street, the Rue du Chemin-Vert-St- 
Antoine, he looked back, and saw the whole length 
of the Pont d'Austerlitz, and the four shadows that had 
just come upon it. Resuming the journey he finally 
came to the wall of the Convent of the Little Picpus. 
The aspect of that part of the city associated with the 
latter half of the flight has so entirely changed that to 
attempt to follow the footsteps of Jean Valjean and 
Cosette would be waste of time. But half an hour's 
rambling near the Pantheon, begun with the winding 
descent of the slope from the church of Saint-Etienne- 
du-Mont, will reveal quaint old-world streets that 
retain something of the flavour of that epic flight. 



III. THE PARIS OF THACKERAY AND 
DICKENS 

*^ The Ballad of the Bouillabaisse^' — Terre's Tavern — "A 
Caution to Travellers" — Thackeray as Art Student and Corres- 
pondent — The Early Married Life — Mrs. Brookfield — The Paris 
of " Vanity Fair" " The Nezvcomes," and " The Adventures of 
Philip" — The Paris of Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities" — • 
Dickens's Days in Paris. 

A street there is in Paris famous, 
For which no rhyme our language yields. 
Rue Neuve des Petits Champs its name is, 
The New Street of the Little Fields. 
And there's an inn not rich and splendid, 
But still in comfortable case. 
The which in youth I oft attended 
To eat a plate of bouillabaisse. 

THE genial Laird, one of the Three Musketeers 
of the Brush of Mr. Du Maurier's "Trilby," 
tossed on a bed of fever, while kindly French 
nurses in attendance wept as they listened to the 
reverential voice in which he mumbled over what they 
conceived to be his prayers. But these ''prayers," 
strangely enough, always ended with allusion to — 

Red peppers, garlic, roach, and dace. 
All these you get in Terre's Tavern 
In that one dish of bouillabaisse. 

28 



PARIS OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS 29 

Thousands of other Scotchmen, and tens of thousands 
of Britons and of Americans have thrilled, as Sandy 
McAllister of Cockpen did, over the verses into which 
Thackeray, writing in a vein of assumed lightness, 
poured so much of the feeling of his lost youth. As 
poetry, *'The Ballad of the Bouillabaisse" is not to 
be ranked with Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Neither 
is Kipling's **Mandalay." Thackeray himself wrote 
many better verses, but none which has so delighted the 
ear and the palate of posterity, and which is so likely 
to endure. Every now and then its vitality is attested 
by some new Columbus who discovers in a Paris res- 
taurant to his liking the original of Terre's Tavern. 
For example there was the American, Julian Street, 
who, six or seven years ago in a little book called ''Paris 
a la Carte," wrote: "Those who remember Thackeray's 
'Ballad of the Bouillabaisse* will find the restaurant 
therein celebrated a few blocks back of the Cafe La- 
perousse, near the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. 
I do not know that bouillabaisse may still be had there, 
but I hope so. Perhaps you will find out." 

Now as a matter of fact the restaurant of Mr. Street's 
discovery actually has certain Thackerayan associa- 
tions. Thackeray dined there often when he was an art 
student, and to this day there hangs on the wall a 
portrait of the novelist at table, and an appended note 
setting forth the facts of his fame and his patronage. 
But it never was Terre's. The site of the lair of the 
bouillabaisse is not on the south side of the river at all, 
but is almost within a stone's throw of the great boule- 
vards and the fashionable shops of the Rue de la Paix. 



30 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Soon after Thackeray's Paris days the Rue Neuve des 
Petits Champs became the Rue des Petits Champs. It 
is that to-day, running from the Rue de la Paix, upon 
which its western end abuts, diagonally across the 
Avenue de I'Opera, back of the gardens of the Palais 
Royal, and almost to the Place des Victoires. The 
number of the building occupied by Terre's Tavern was 
originally i6. The structure that now occupies the 
site is of conventional type and architecture, and may 
be identified by the sign of a banking-house that pro- 
jects at right angles over the sidewalk. 

The impression of one of the many who came in con- 
tact with the personal Thackeray and afterward wrote 
about it was that he spoke the most beautiful French 
that the visitor had ever heard from the lips of an 
Englishman. That encomium was quahfied b}^ Thack- 
eray himself when he confessed to a foreigner's limita- 
tions in judging the style of George Sand, whose sen- 
tences nevertheless impressed him with their charm, 
seeming to him like "the sound of country bells — ■ 
provoking I don't know what vein of musing and 
meditation, and falling sweetly and sadly on the ear." 
Perhaps French was not quite a second mother language 
to him as it was to Du Maurier and has been to half a 
dozen other English men of letters. But the Paris of 
his day was as familiar to him as were his own Pall Mall 
and Russell Square; and with that part of him which 
was not wholly belligerently British, he very much 
preferred it to the London of fogs and of the intolerant 
eyes of the Lord Farintoshes and the Sir Barnes New- 
comes. 



PARIS OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS 31 

It was not exactly Thackeray's fault that his novels 
were not written from a detached point of view. He 
simply could not help being autobiographical. How 
much of himself he gave in the making of Arthur Pen- 
dennis is a matter of general knowledge. The Paris of 
his youth, and many of his aspirations and heartaches 
are reflected in the pages of "The Adventures of 
Philip." The first chapter of "The Paris Sketch Book" 
is entitled "A Caution to Travellers." The moral it 
conveys is one of the oldest of morals. The story was 
told two thousand years before Thackeray. Ten 
years ago one of the cleverest of American tale-spinners 
was retelling it with conspicuous success. A hundred 
years hence, and five hundred years hence the same 
plot will probably again be presented with little or no 
variation. It is the innocent traveller who falls among 
gilded thieves. In the Thackerayan version the name 
of the victim happened to be Sam Pogson; the fascinat- 
ing lady called herself for the time being la Baronne 
Florval-Derval, and her accomplices were a mythical 
baron and a son of that Earl of Cinqbars who was 
ubiquitous In Thackeray's pages. And the particular 
scene of the fleecing was an apartment in the Rue Tait- 
bout. But the point of the matter is that the experience 
was one that Thackeray in his callow days — and he 
seems to have had quite a faculty for playing the fool — 
had shared with others equally guileless and impres- 
sionable. Even though he never dropped his h'sy he 
had been Sam Pogson for a day. 

If ever there was a book made by a book review it 
was "Vanity Fair." The first numbers dragged, as 



32 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

"Pickwick" liad dragged before Sam Weller came upon 
the scene. The British pubhc was slow to recognize 
that a new star was beginning to glitter in the literary 
firmament. Ihen came Abraham Hayward's sweep- 
ing tribute in the Edinburgh Rcviczv for January, 1848; 
and with it the doors were opened, and Thackeray 
passed in to take his place among the accepted masters 
of English fiction. In introducing the man, Hayward 
recalled finding him, ten or twelve years before, day after 
day engaged \\\ the Louvre copying pictures in order to 
qualify himself for his intended profession of artist. The 
gallery of the Louvre, as much as the Charterhouse, or 
Cambridge, was a school that played a conspicuous 
part in Thackeray's intellectual development. It was 
not that there he learned to draw — he never did that — 
but there, under the influence of the mighty dead, he 
completed his education in the humanities. 

It was in July, 1833, when he was twenty-two years 
old, and acting as Paris correspondent of The Na- 
tional Standard and Journal of LitcraturCy SciencCy 
Musicy Thcatricalsy and the Fine Arts — a little paper 
first edited and subsequently purchased by him — that 
he wrote to his mother, Mrs. Carmichael Smyth: *T 
have been thinking very seriously of turning artist. I 
can draw better than I can do anything else, and cer- 
tainly I should like it better than any other occupation, 
so why shouldn't I?" In answer to the question he 
trudged off to spend the pleasant and profitable days 
in a room — half a mile long, with as many windows as 
Aladdin's palace — open from sunrise till evening, and 
free to all manners and varieties of study, where the 



PARIS OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS 33 

brethren of the brush, though they sleep perhaps In a 
garret, and dine in a cellar, have a luxury which sur- 
passes all others, and the enjoyment of a palace which 
all the money of all the Rothschilds could not buy. 
Thackeray's first Paris was the city he had visited as a 
wide-eyed boy. His second Paris was the Louvre. 

Then came the Paris of his marriage and his honey- 
moon. On August 20, 1836, he and Miss Isabella 
Gethen Creagh Shawe, a daughter of Colonel Matthew 
Shawe of a Bengal regiment, were united in the British 
Embassy, and went to live in the Rue Neuve Saint 
Augustin, hard by Terre's Tavern. There is an echo 
of that period in certain lines of the ^** Ballad of the 
Bouillabaisse": 

Ah me! how quick the days are flitting! 

I mind me of a time that's gone, 
When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting. 

In this same place — but not alone. 
A fair young form was nestled near me, 

A dear, dear face looked fondly up. 
And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me 

— ^There's no one now to share my cup. 

No. For many years there was no one to share his cup. 

There is no need to dwell at length upon the tragedy 
of Thackeray's brief married life, or the long period 
during which he was practically a widower. It was the 
Paris of his youth that was associated with his first great 
affair of the heart; the Paris of his maturity played a 
part in his second journey into the realm of serious 
sentimental attachment. For when the lady in the 
case was exasperatingly friendly and exasperatingly 



34 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

discreet, it was to Paris that the great man repaired, 
there to brood over his infatuation, and to write letters 
in which the tone changed abruptly from assumed 
lightness to violent recrimination. Thackeray seems 
to have first met Jane Octavia Brookfield about 1839, 
three years after his marriage, and soon after the 
separation enforced by Mrs. Thackeray's mental 
trouble. The husband. Reverend William H. Brook- 
field, had been known to Thackeray in the undergrad- 
uate days at Cambridge. A chance meeting led to 
Brookfield's taking Thackeray home unexpectedly to 
dinner when there happened to be nothing in the 
house but a shoulder of cold mutton, and the em- 
barrassed hostess was obliged to send a maid to a neigh- 
bouring pastrycook's for a dozen tartlets. The first 
letter in what is known as the "Brookfield correspon- 
ence," which was kept so long a mystery and finally 
given to the public early in 1914, was one written by 
Thackeray to M. Cazati in Paris, asking the latter to 
do the honours in the French capital for Mr. Brook- 
field. Some years elapsed, however, before the novel- 
ist's attentions began to cause comment. Brookfield 
himself seems to have been a complaisant husband, and 
Jane the "bread- and butter-cutting Charlotte" of 
"The Sorrows of Werther"; but In 1850 the lady's 
uncle, Henry Hallam, was moved to protest at the fre- 
quency of Thackeray's visits. So the greater part of 
1850, Thackeray, who about the time was writing 
"Pendennis," spent in Paris. To indicate his affluence 
and extravagance, It Is necessary merely to mention that 
he stayed at the Hotel Bristol, in the Place Vendome. 



PARIS OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS 35 

From Paris he wrote often to Mrs. Brookfield, and 
often to others about her, in the latter letters expressing 
freely his unfavourable opinion of the husband. It was 
the Paris of the presidency of Louis Napoleon, just be- 
fore the coup d'etaty and in one letter he tells of the 
President's ball and the people he met there: 

When I tell you, ma'am, that there were tradesmen and their wives 
present! I saw one woman pull off a pair of list slippers and take a 
ticket for them at the greatcoat repository; and I rather liked her 
for being so bold. Confess now, would you have the courage to go 
to court in Hst slippers and ask the footman at the door to keep 'em 
till you came out? Well, there was Lady Castlereagh looking un- 
commonly 'andsome, and the Spanish Ambassador's wife blazing 
with new diamonds and looking like a picture by Velasquez, with 
daring red cheeks and bright eyes. And there was the Princess 
what-d'you-call-'em, the President's cousin, covered with diamonds 
too, superb and sulky. . . . The children went to church yes- 
terday, and Minny sat next to Guizot, and Victor Hugo was there — a 
queer heathen. Did you read of his ordering his son to fight a duel 
the other day with the son of another Hterary man? Young Hugo 
wounded his adversary and I suppose his father embraced him and 
applauded him — and goes to church afterwards as if he was a Chris- 
tian. ... I am going to Gudin's to-night, being tempted by 
the promise of meeting Scribe, Dumas, Mery; and if none of them 
are there, what am I to do? 

So much, in this limited narrative, for the Paris of 
Thackeray's life. There is the Paris of his books. 
Henry Esmond went there to plan the great scheme 
that was to restore the Stuarts on the English throne, a 
gallant venture brought to naught by the Prince's 
pursuit of Beatrix. That eighteenth-century Paris 
was the scene of various activities of the Beatrix of 



36 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

later years, the Baroness Bernstein of "The Virginians.** 
After Waterloo the Rawdon Crawleys lived in Paris for 
a time — little Rawdon being put out to nurse in the 
suburbs — and departing, left behind them innumerable 
debts. In *'The Newcomes," from the Hotel de la 
Terrasse which was on the Rue de Rivoli, Clive wrote 
to his friend Pendennis, telling of his first walk in the 
Tuileries Gardens, "with the chestnuts out, the statues 
all shining, and all thewindowsof the palace in a blaze," 
and recording that the Palais Royal had changed much 
since Scott's time. It would hardly have been Thack- 
eray's fist if the Louvre had not been brought in to play 
an early part in the narrative. There Clive fell in love 
with the most beautiful creature that the world has 
ever seen. "She was standing, silent and majestic, in 
the centre of one of the rooms of the statue gallery, and 
the very first glimpse of her struck one breathless with 
the sense of her beauty. I could not see the colour of 
her eyes and hair exactly, but the latter is light, and the 
eyes, I should think, are gray. She may be some two 
and thirty years old, and she was born about two thou- 
sand years ago. Her name is the Venus of Milo." 

Then Clive and his father went to dine with the Vi- 
comte de Florae at the Cafe de Paris, which was cer- 
tainly not where the restaurant of that name is to be 
found to-day; and then, in a house in the Rue Saint-Do- 
minique — the Thackerayan visitor of the present Anno 
Domini may select the edifice that best fits his own 
mental picture — "Tom" Newcome again saw his 
Leonore after all the years. To Clive's eyes that tender 
and ceremonious meeting was like an elderly Sir Charles 



PARIS OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS 37 

Grandison saluting a middle-aged Miss Byron. It is 
the most beautiful of all Thackeray's love stories. Later 
another love story ran part of its troubled course in the 




««5PiSjpjtf ky;-l», 



RUE SAINT-DOMINIQUE 

Hotel de Florae and the little garden behind. There, 
under the kindly chaperonage of the sweet French lady, 
Clive and Ethel were closer in communion of heart 
than ever before or after, save possibly in that fable- 
land at which Thackeray hinted as lying beyond the 
horizon of "Finis." About the Hotel de Florae there 
was an American flavour, for when Clive first saw it, 
the upper part was rented to "Major-General the Hon- 
orable Zeno F. Pokey, of Cincinnati, U. S.'* 

Though his metier was not the melodramatic school, 
there are plenty of great moments in Thackeray. An- 
thony Trollope held Lady Rachel's disclosure of Henry's 
legitimacy to the Duke of Hamilton in "Esmond" 
to be the greatest scene in EngHsh fiction. What 



.38 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

reader can forget the pursuit of the Prince to Castle- 
wood, or George Osborne lying on his face, "dead, with 
a bullet through his heart," or Becky, admiring her 
husband, "strong, brave, and victorious"? Once 
Thackeray reached heights in a comic scene, in the bat- 
tle between the Bayneses, the Bunches, and the Mac- 
Whirters, in the Champs-Elysees pension of Madame 
Smolensk. The "Petit Chateau d'Espagne" was the 
sonorous name of the pension in question, and the full 
title of the proprietress, which Mrs. Baynes used in 
letters designed to impress her friends, was Madame la 
Generale Baronne de Smolensk. But save as indicating 
a general type of pension that flourished in the streets 
adjacent to that part of the Champs-Elysees that lies 
about the Rond Point in Thackeray's time, it is prac- 
tically certain that the "Petit Chateau d'Espagne'* 
was never more than an imaginary structure. 

Closer to reality were the bohemian haunts of Philip 
Firmin. Like some of the characters of Balzac, Firmin 
was in the habit of dining at Flicoteau's. Flicoteau's 
was an actual restaurant of the Paris of 1840, which 
stood on ground now occupied by one of the newer 
buildings of the Sorbonne. There, for an expenditure 
of seventeen sous, Philip sat down to the enjoyment of 
the soup, the beef, the roti, the salad, the dessert, and 
the whitey-brown bread at discretion. He would have 
been poor in the Rue de la Paix; he was wealthy in the 
Luxembourg quarter. His habitation was the Hotel 
Poussin, in the Rue Poussin, where there was a little 
painted wicket that opened, ringing; and the passage 
and the stair led to Monsieur Philippe's room, which 



PARIS OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS 39 

was on the first floor, as was that of Bouchard, the 
painter, who had his atelier over the way. Besides 
Bouchard, who was a bad painter but a worthy friend, 
the Hotel Poussin sheltered Laberge of the second floor, 
the poet from Carcassonne, who pretended to be study- 
ing law but whose heart was with the Muses, and whose 
talk was of Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset; and the 
suspiciously wealthy Escasse; and old Colonel Dujarret, 
who had been a prisoner of war in England; and Tymow- 
ski, sighing over his Poland. No such street as the Rue 
Poussin now exists in that part of Paris. It debouched, 
according to Philip, into the Rue de Seine, which winds 
in back of the Institute of France from the Quai Mala- 
quais, and runs to the south, crossing the Boulevard 
Saint-Germain. The Rue Visconti, where Balzac had 
the printing-press that ruined him, or the Rue des 
Beaux Arts, both little changed in the course of three- 
quarters of a century, will give the visitor the flavour 
of Philip Firmin's environment. To Thackeray the 
Hotel Poussin was more than a corner of the city he 
loved so well. It was Bohemia; it was the careless, 
light, laughing youth of which he had sung in his adap- 
tation from Beranger's "Le Grenier." 

The little room with pensive eyes I view 

Where in my youth I weathered it so long, 
With a wild mistress, a staunch friend or two, 

And a hght heart still breaking into song. 
Making a mock of life and all its cares, 

Rich in the glory of my rising sun, 
Lightly I vaulted up four pairs of stairs, 

In the brave days when I was twenty-one. 



40 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

France is in "Dombey and Son," and it is in'* Little 
Dorrit." But for the Paris of the fiction of Dickens 
the natural and inevitable turning is to *'A Tale of Two 
Cities," which was first in its author's mind as "One of 
These Days," then as "Buried Alive," then as "The 
Thread of Gold," and then as "The Doctor of Beau- 
vais." "A Tale of Two Cities," which Andrew Lang 
held to be one of the three most enthralling stories ever 
written (the other two being "Quentin Durward" and 
"Twenty Years After"), and "Barnaby Rudge" were 
Dickens's only ventures in the field of the historical 
novel, and the preparation of the scene, of the former 
especially, was a work of great care and elaboration. 
The Paris that he personally knew was the city of the 
'forties and the 'fifties. To ensure topographical 
accuracy he spent days in poring over old maps and in 
laboriously consulting documents, essays, and chron- 
icles. To Mercier's "Tableau de Paris," which had 
been printed in Amsterdam, he turned for the picture 
of his Marquis. Rousseau was his authority for the 
peasant's shutting up his house when he had a bit of 
meat; in the tax tables of the period he studied the 
general wretched condition of the proletariat in the 
years when the storm of revolution was gathering. 
"These," records Forster, "are interesting intimations 
of the care with which Dickens worked; and there is no 
instance in his novels, excepting this, of a deliberate 
and planned departure from the method of treatment 
which had been preeminently the source of his popu- 
larity as a novelist." Also Carlyle's "French Revolu- 
tion" had recently appeared, and Froude tells us of the 



PARIS OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS 41 

tremendous hold it took on Dickens's mind. **He 
carried a copy of it with him wherever he went." 

It was the Saint-Antoine quarter, seething into revolt, 
that was almost the protagonist of the early Paris chap- 
ters of the book. There, in a street the exact identity 
of which is a matter of no particular importance, was 
the wineshop of Monsieur and Madame Defarge. It was 
"haggard Saint-Antoine"; "clamorous Saint-Antoine"; 
"Saint-Antoine a vast dusky mass of scarecrows heaving 
to and fro"; "Saint-Antoine shouting and dancing his 
angry blood up"; "Saint-Antoine writing his crimes on 
flaring sheets of paper"; "Saint-Antoine sleeping and 
dreaming of the fresh vengeance of the morrow." Then 
the note changed. A new figure came to replace Saint- 
Antoine, a hideous figure that grew as familiar as if it 
had been before the general gaze from the foundations 
of the world — the figure of the sharp female called La 
Guillotine. "It was the popular theme for jests; it was 
the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented the 
hair from turning gray, it imparted a peculiar delicacy 
to the complexion, it was the national razor which 
shaved close; who kissed La Guillotine looked through 
the little window and sneezed into the sack." 

But there were material scenes. Miss Press "threaded 
her way along the narrow streets and crossed the river 
by the bridge of the Pont Neuf"; from the Prison of 
the Abbaye, Gabelle wrote the letter beginning "Mon- 
sieur heretofore the Marquis"; Charles Darnay, jour- 
neying from England in response and making his way 
in bad equipages drawn by bad horses over bad roads, 
was consigned to La Force. Tellson's Bank was in 



42 



THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 



the Saint-Germain quarter, ''in the wing of a large 
house, approached by a courtyard and shut off from 
the street by a high wall and a strong gate"; Alexandre 
Manette wrote his story while in a doleful cell in the 
Bastille; part of the Palais de Justice as we see it to-day 
IS the Conciergerie, where Evremond awaited execu- 
tion; it was on a spot 
which is now part of 
the beautiful Place de 
la Concorde that Sid- 
ney Carton made the 
supreme sacrifice. "He 
has described London," 
wrote one of his earliest 
critics, "like a special 
correspondent for 
posterity." The same 
might be said of his 
Paris of the sans- 
culo tte s y and the 
awakening of the 
Greater Jacquerie. 
Dickens first saw Paris, to know it, in November, 
1846. With his family he had left England the end of 
the preceding May, crossing to Belgium, and travelling 
by way of the Rhine to Switzerland, where a stay of 
several months was made. Then the party made its 
way from Geneva, journeying in three carriages and 
stopping between six and seven each evening. The 
arrival was a day later than expected, and the stop was 
at the Hotel Brighton in the Rue de Rivoli. Two years 




THE CONCIERGERIE 



PARIS OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS 43 

earlier Dickens had passed through the city on his way 
to Italy. This time he was there for a stay of three 
months. His first experience was a "colossal" walk 
about the streets, half frightened by the brightness and 
brilliance, in the course of which his notice was at- 
tracted by a book in a shop window announced as "Les 
Mysteres de Londres par Sir Trollopp." In frequent 
letters to Forster he practised his French, which was 
apparently very good, though one suspects references 
to the text-book or dictionary convenient to hand. 
Then Forster crossed the Channel to join him, and the 
Parisian education began in earnest. Together they 
passed through every variety of sightseeing — prisons, 
palaces, theatres, hospitals, the Morgue, the Saint- 
Lazare House of Detention, as well as the Louvre, Ver- 
sailles, Saint-Cloud, and all the spots made memorable 
by the First Revolution. The comedian Regnier made 
them free of the green-room of the Franfais. They 
supped with Alexandre Dumas, and with Eugene Sue — 
then at the height of his fame — and met Theophile 
Gautier and Alphonse Karr. Forster relates : 



We saw Lamartine also, and had much friendly intercourse with 
Scribe, and with the good-natured Amedee Pichot. One day we 
visited in the Rue du Bac the sick and ailing Chateaubriand, whom 
we thought like Basil Montagu; found ourselves at the other extreme 
of opinion in the sculpture-room of David d'Angers; and closed that 
day at the house of Victor Hugo, by whom Dickens was received 
with infinite courtesy and grace. The great writer then occupied a 
floor in a noble corner house in the Place Royale, the old quarter of 
Ninon I'Enclos, and the people of the Regency. ... I never 
saw upon any features so keenly intellectual such a soft and sweet 



44 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

gentility, and certainly never heard the French language spoken 
with the picturesque distinctness given to it by Victor Hugo. 

Even more pronounced in literary flavour was Dick- 
ens's second Paris residence of 1855-56. Then his 
social life was passed almost exclusively among vmters, 
painters, actors, and musicians. His apartment was in 
the Avenue des Champs-Elysees, within a door or two 01 
the Jardin d'Hiver. The painter, Ary SchefFer, brought 
many distinguished Frenchmen there. Besides, he had 
the society of fellow craftsmen of his own nation. Wilkie 
Collins was in Paris, and the Brownings, and Thackeray 
(the estrangement between the two men over the 
Yates-Garrick Club case had not yet taken place) ran 
over from London to pay visits to his daughters, who, 
like the Dickenses, were living in the Champs-Elysees. 
At Scribe's table Dickens dined frequently, and found 
the dinners and the company to his liking. At the 
house of Madame Viardot, the sister of Malibran, he 
met George Sand, and was not greatly impressed. In 
his honour Emile de Girardin gave two banquets the 
descriptions of which read like pages from the "Arabian 
Nights" or from Dumas's**The Count of Monte-Cristo." 
This life ended late in April, 1856, when Dickens re- 
turned to London. In January, 1863, he visited Paris 
for the last time for the purpose of reading at the 
Embassy in behalf of the British Charitable Fund. 



IV. THE TRAIL OF THE MUSKETEERS AND 
OTHERS 

The Personal Alexandre Dumas — The '^ Novel Manufactory" 
— From Villers-Cotterets to Paris — Early Paris Homes — The 
Chateau of Monte Cristo — Dumas* s Death at Dieppe — The City 
of the Valois — The Streets of the Musketeers. 

IN A recent letter to the present Pilgrim, discussing 
certain Paris associations and memories, an Ameri- 
can novelist spoke of a residence he had once oc- 
cupied for many months in the Rue de Tournon. As a 
short cut to the identification of the general neighbour- 
hood he wrote: *'You know, it was just round the 
corner from the places where Aramis and Company 
used to hang out." It would have been difficult to have 
found a line of description more illuminating. For 
amazing as it may at first glance seem, the trail of 
"Aramis et Cie.'*, as Mr. Booth Tarkington rather 
oddly called them, a trail of the seventeenth century, 
is far easier to follow than the trails of the men and 
women of fiction who lived in the Paris of 1830, or even 
of i860. But before taking up the subject of the city 
of the astonishing and delightful Messieurs Athos, 
Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan of "Les Trois Mous- 
quetaires," "Vingt Ans Apres," and *'Le Vicomte de 
Bragelonne," there should be a consideration of the 

45 



46 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Paris and the personality of their equally astonishing 
though not always equally delightful creator. 

Perhaps the best way to understand Alexandre 
Dumas the Elder is to pick out from the thousand and 
one stories told of him those that seem least likely to be 
true. Add to these twenty or thirty of the best witti- 
cisms at his expense, including those of the son who at 
once adored and deplored him, and season the impres- 
sion with a glance at a dozen of the cartoons depicting 
his thick lips and woolly pate. Finally throw in a bit 
of Monte Cristo, a suggestion of d'Artagnan and Por- 
thos, something of Chicot the Jester, and a good deal 
of that arch humbug, Joseph Balsamo, alias Cagliostro. 
The result will probably be a kind of Arabian Nights 
figure at large in the modern western world, but it is to 
the atmosphere of Aladdin and his Lamp, and Ali-Baba, 
and the Young King of the Black Isles that we turn 
for the full flavour of the grandson of the St. Domingo 
negress, Marie Cessette Dumas, the son of the "Hora- 
tius Codes of the Tyrol," and the father of the rather 
austere moralist of "Le Demi Monde." 

*'My father is a big baby," once said Alexandre j^/j; 
"he is so vain that he would climb up on the back of his 
own coach in order that people might think that he kept 
a negro footman. He is a great devil of all the vani- 
ties." Like Edmond Dantes in the plenitude of power 
he flung his money to the four winds of heaven; in his 
chateau of "Monte-Cristo" the table was always set 
for an army of shady sycophants, but unlike Dantes, 
who was forever discharging not only his own debts 
but those of others, Dumas was ever a thorn in the side 



TRAIL OF MUSKETEERS AND OTHERS 47 

of the trusting tradesman. To get the money to fling 
broadcast he would sign any contract, undertake any 
task. His employment of a small army of collaborators 
to help write the books to which he appended his name — 
his ** Novel Manufactury: House of Alexandre Dumas 
and Company" — may perhaps be extenuated. His 
aides, with the possible exception of Maquet, were never 
able to do anything by themselves, and, to quote Thack- 
eray: "Does not the chief cook have aides under him? 
Did not Rubens's pupils paint on his canvases .f" Had 
not Lawrence assistants for his backgrounds?" But 
in later life he resorted to expedients which permit of 
no apology. Signing up for a series of articles on snakes, 
and collecting payment in advance, he would fulfill his 
part of the contract by writing: "We now come to the 
boa-constrictor. Let us consider what my learned 
friend Dr. So-and-So has to say." Then four pages 
copied, verhatimy from an encyclopedia, and the con- 
cluding original Hnes: "In our next paper we shall 
take up that interesting little creature, the asp." To 
that depth he was willing to descend for money. To 
attract attention to himself when interest was on the 
wane he played a fiddle in the windows of boulevard 
cafes. Our judgments scorn him; our hearts continue 
to love him as they love his creations. 

A few years ago allusion to Dumas's birthplace at 
Villers-Cotterets (he was born July 24, 1802), would have 
had little meaning. Now the fact that the town is a 
close neighbour of Chateau-Thierry gives a new signifi- 
cance. From Villers-Cotterets, in 1823, Dumas took 
coach for Paris and his first home in the city was at 



48 



THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 



No. 9 Rue de Bouloi, a stlll-existing street not far from 
the Palais Royal. Thence he soon removed to the 
near-by Rue Herold, then known as the Rue des Vieux- 
Augustins, incidentally a street in which Thackeray 
and his young bride went to live just after their mar- 
riage. Dumas's next residence was in the present 
Place Boieldieu, directly back of the Opera Comique, 

and after that he lived, 
with his mother, on 
the second floor of No. 
53 Rue du Faubourg 
Saint-Denis, next door 
to the old cabaret, "Au 
Lion d'Argent." Then 
for the nine years from 
1824 to 1833 he was on 
the south bank, at 
No. 25 Rue de I'Uni- 
versite, on the south- 
eastern corner of the 
Rue du Bac. That was the period of the Dumas 
in which we are least interested, the Dumas of the 
theatre, of "Henri III," "Christine," and "Anthony." 
The great romances "Monte-Cristo" and "Les Trois 
Mousquetaires" were written at No. 22 Rue de Rivoli 
(which number was then between the Rue des Pyramides 
and the Rue Saint-Roch close to the Jeanne d'Arc 
statue), at No. 109 Rue de Richelieu, and No. 45 Rue 
de la Chaussee d'Antin. 

Then, from 1847 to 1854, the Monte-Cristo period, 
Dumas had rented a villa at Saint-Germain, and, find- 




MEUNG. WHERE D ARTAGNAN FIRST AP- 
PEARED UPON THE SCENE OF FICTION 



, TRAIL OF MUSKETEERS AND OTHERS 49 

ing the countryside to his Hking, decided to erect a 
chateau according to his own ideas. "Dumas's Folly" 
was what it was called, though everyone was anxious 
to see it and to enjoy its hospitahty. Five or six hun- 
dred guests went from Paris to share in the housewarm- 
ing, and to be afterward entertained in the Saint-Ger- 
main theatre with the improvised play, "Shakepeare et 
Dumas.'* The chateau consisted of a ground floor 
and two upper ones, and was surrounded by a stone 
balcony. There was a frieze formed by a series of me- 
dallions, each representing some famous author, be- 
ginning with Homer and ending with Victor Hugo. 
*'I don't see you among them, Monsieur Dumas," 
said a visitor. "Oh, I shall be inside," was the reply. 
Over the front door of "Monte-Cristo" were the Dumas 
arms with his motto: J'aime qui m'aimey which may be 
roughly and yet appropriately translated by the ribald 
chorus : 

I don't give give a damn for any damn man 
Who don't give a damn for me. 

To " Monte-Cristo " repaired a swarm of adventurers, 
male and female. It was necessary only to express 
admiration of this novel or that to win an invitation 
to dine and spend the night. Once installed, the flat- 
terer was hard to dislodge. Dumas, in his good nature, 
usually invented the excuse that explained the pro- 
longed stay. There was the typical case of the "ther- 
mometer man." That was the person for whom the 
novelist, to avoid turning him adrift, invented the duty 
of going every day to find what the thermometer regis- 



so THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

tered. *'I assure you, my dear fellow, that you will 
be doing me a very great service: there is an intimate 
connection between theatrical receipts and the condi- 
tion of the atmosphere, and it is most important for me 
to be well informed on this point." From "Monte 
Cristo" Dumas could no more turn away an animal 
than he could a man. There were vultures, apes, 
parrots, pheasants, and a varied assortment of fowls. 
Above all there were dogs. Finally the number of the 
dogs reached thirteen, which Dumas considered un- 
lucky. His servant suggested turning away one. "No, 
Michel, bring in another; that will make fourteen." 

But women naturally made the most of the lavish 
hospitality. The chateau was ruled by a succession 
of fair chatelaines^ mostly of the theatrical profession. 
When one of them departed from "Monte Cristo" she 
usually took the best of the furniture as a souvenir of her 
stay. Consequently there was need of continual replen- 
ishment. Dumas was not blind to the situation. Some- 
times he would be working in his kiosque at the novel 
on hand, and would be disturbed by the shouting of 
those who were gathered round his bountiful table. 
Then he would grumble a little. "I don't say that it 
does not give me pleasure to write my novels, but it is 
not quite the same pleasure as that of my friends who 
do not write them." Again he said: "Hereafter men 
will describe me as a panier perce, as they will perhaps 
forget that it was not always I who made the hole in the 
basket." Yet when, during one of his absences, the 
actress who was for the time being installed as chate- 
laine wrote frantically asking him what was to be done 



TRAIL OF MUSKETEERS AND OTHERS 51 

about the servants' wine, saying: "There is no more 
vin ordinaire left in the cellars — nothing, in fact, but 
champagne," his reply was: "Let them have the cham- 
pagne; it will do them good." 

Even his extraordinary earnings — fifty thousand 
dollars a year is a conservative estimate of the average 
of the 'forties, when the purchasing power of both franc 
and dollar were far higher than now — could not support 
this existence forever. In 1854 he disappeared into 
Belgium, taking up his residence in the Boulevard Wat- 
erloo in Brussels. He returned to Paris in 1856 and 
for ten years lived at No. yy Rue d'Amsterdam. From 
1866 till 1870 his residence was at No. 107 Boulevard 
Malesherbes. Then came the war, the defeat, and the 
march of the Prussians on Paris. In the middle of 
September it was found necessary to move him out of 
harm's way. Weak and aihng he was taken to the 
house that his son had erected at Puys, on the Norman 
coast, near Dieppe. There he died on the 5th of De- 
cember, 1870. 

There are naturally as many Parises in the novels of 
Dumas as there were distinct periods of French history 
which, to use his own words, he tried to elevate to the 
dignity of romance. It is enough here to consider three : 
the Paris of the Valois; the Paris of the Musketeers, 
which means the city from 1625 to 1660; and the Paris 
of "Monte Cristo," which belonged to the early half 
of the last century. Indeed, as "Monte Cristo" is to 
be considered first of all as a story of Marseilles, atten- 
tion here may be confined entirely to the city that 
knew Chicot, and the city that knew d'Artagnan. Very 



52 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

little of Valois Paris is left to-day, but here and there 
the searcher is able to find monuments and bits of old 
streets that recall the scenery familiar to the Reine 
Margot, to Bussy-d'Amboise, and the Forty-five 
Guardsmen. 

The Valois triology begins with the marriage of Mar- 
guerite de France and the Bearnais, Henri de Navarre. 
The religious ceremony was performed under the grand 
portal of Notre Dame, for Henri's heresy forbade his 
marriage within. Then followed the festivities in the 
old Louvre. "There is no change in these walls," said 
Benjamin ElHs Martin, "since that day, except that a 
vaulted ceiling took the place, in 1806, of the original 
oaken beams, which had served for rare hangings, not of 
tapestries, but of men. The long corridors and square 
rooms above, peopled peaceably by pictures now, echoed 
to the rushing of frightened feet on the night of Saint- 
Bartholomew, when Margot saved the life of her hus- 
band that was and of her lover that was to be. Hidden 
within the massive walls of Philippe-Auguste's building 
is a spiral staircase of his time connecting the Salle des 
Sept Cheminees with the floor below, and beneath that 
with the cumbrous underground portions of his old 
Louvre. As one gropes down the worn steps, around 
the sharp turns deep below the surface, visions appear 
of Valois conspiracy and of the Intrigues of the Floren- 
tine queen-mother." 

Perhaps best remembered of all the splendid scenes 
of the Valois triology are the duel between the mignons 
of the King and the followers of the Duke of Guise and 
the great fight for life made by Bussy-d'Amboise against 



TRAIL OF MUSKETEERS AND OTHERS 53 

the assassins of the Comte de Monsoreau. Both those 
episodes Dumas drew from the pages of Brantome, 
telhng the story much more dramatically than Bran- 
tome told it. Let the traveller of to-day take his stand 
before the Victor Hugo house in the Place des Vosges 
and he will be almost on the exact spot where, on Sun- 
day, April 27, 1578, took place the conflict from which 
Antraguet alone survived, while Quelus, Schomberg, 
Livarot, Ribeirac, and Maugiron either perished on the 
ground or died from wounds. Quelus, the King's 
favourite, pierced by nineteen wounds, lingered for a 
month in Hotel de Boissy, in the near-by Rue Saint- 
Antoine, which the King had closed with chains against 
traffic. The irreverent Parisians, alluding to the King's 
grief, suggested that the Pont Neuf, of which the foun- 
dations had just been laid, should be called the "Bridge 
of Tears." Also in the Rue Saint-Antoine, at the cor- 
ner of what is now the Rue Sevigne, which begins al- 
most opposite the Lycee Charlemagne, was the town 
house of the Comte de Monsoreau. To this house, 
says Brantome, Bussy d'Amboise, done with Margot, 
was lured by a note written by the countess, under her 
husband's orders and eyes, giving her lover, Bussy, his 
usual rendezvous during the count's absence. This 
time the count was at home, with a group of his armed 
men, and there, on the night of August 19, 1579, the 
gallant was duly and thoroughly done to death. In 
the pages of Dumas the duel followed the assassination 
by a few hours; historically the duel preceded the kill- 
ing of Bussy by almost sixteen months. Two inns 
likely to be recalled by readers of the Valois trilogy 



54 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

were the "Come d'Abondance," the scene of some of 
Chicot's memorable exploits, which was in the Rue 
Saint-Jacques, on the south side of the river; and the 
"Sword of the Brave Chevalier," the meeting place of 
the Forty Five, in the Rue de Bussy, now the Rue de 
Buci, near the modern Boulevard Saint-Germain. 

But after all Chicot is not quite D'Artagnan, nor is 
"Marguerite de Valois" "Les Trois Mousquetaires." 
So back to the old quarter hard by the Luxembourg 
and the trail with which this chapter began. It was in 
1625 that the youthful Gascon entered Paris astride his 
orange-coloured horse Rosinante. Then the Luxem- 
bourg Palace was a comparatively new structure, having 
been begun in 161 5 and finished in 1620. D'Artag- 
nan's grip on his sword hilt was justified by the condi- 
tions of life in the Paris which he had invaded and was 
determined to conquer. Richelieu had done something 
to improve matters, but the city was still internally 
chaotic. Most of the streets were unpaved. Great 
stones obstructed the thoroughfares. There was little 
sewerage, and huge puddles, breeding disease and exhal- 
ing fetid odours, remained in the gutters weeks after a 
rain. The streets were unlighted. People abroad at 
night carried lanterns, but these flitting and flickering 
lights failed to awe the robbers, who flourished in great 
numbers, often boldly carrying on their rascalities in 
broad daylight. As lawless as the highwaymen were 
the pages and lackeys, who spent their nights in in- 
sulting passersby, carrying off young girls, fighting the 
watch, and knocking in the doors of shops. Parlia- 
ment was virtually powerless. Highway robbery was 



TRAIL OF MUSKETEERS AND OTHERS 55 

so common that the witnesses of a theft amused them- 
selves by laughing at the expense of the victim without 
attempting to prevent its commission. Assassins plied 
their vocations in the pubhc squares and markets. The 
administration of justice was primitive and a long rapier 
more imposing than any number of legal documents. 
To inspire deference one had to be either a great noble- 
man or a man of arms. Imagine that old city and then 
start at the Luxembourg, always bearing in mind the 
important fact that there was then no broad Boulevard 
Saint-Michel, and that travel between the Palace and 
the river was by means of the winding Rue de la Harpe, 
of which a bit still remains. 

The Luxembourg Palace fronts on the Rue Vaugir- 
ard, the longest street in Paris. It is the starting point 
of the trail of the Musketeers as we knew them in the 
first book. The apartment of Aramis was in that street, 
just east of the Rue de Cassette. It was on the ground 
floor, discreetly easy of entrance and of exit, and its 
windows looked out on the Luxembourg Gardens op- 
posite. The site is as easy to find as Battery Park or 
Boston Common. Athos lived in the Rue Ferou, within 
two steps of the Luxembourg. The paving and style 
of architecture may have changed, but it is still the Rue 
Ferou, and runs from the Rue Vaugirard to the Place 
Saint-Sulpice. On the other side of the Place Saint- 
Sulpice is the Rue du Vieux Colombier where Porthos 
had his pretended residence, an apartment of much 
elegance according to his story, but to which none of his 
friends had ever been invited. D'Artagnan's first home 
in Paris was in what was then the Rue des Fossoyeurs. 



.56 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

It is now the Rue Servandoni, and is the next parallel 
street to the east of the Rue Ferou, the two thorough- 
fares being still joined by the curious little Rue du 
Canivet. It was close by the home of Aramis that took 
place the duel surpassing even that of *'La Dame 
de Monsoreau," that encounter in which D'Artagnan 
threw in his lot with Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, about 
to engage the Cardinal's Guards, led by the redoubt- 
able Jussac. 

In the third decade of the seventeenth century the 
Bois de Boulogne was far beyond the city walls. Else- 
where to be discussed is the trail of the Musketeers out- 
side of Paris. But after the return from England with 
the diamond necklace the young Gascon repaired, in 
obedience to the letter from Constance Bonacieux, to 
the pavihon at Saint-Cloud, leaving the city by the 
Porte de la Conference, and riding through the Bois de 
Boulogne. The pavilion, under which D'Artagnan 
watched through the night, was destroyed by the Prus- 
sians during the siege of Paris. The home of Porthos's 
"Duchess" was in the Rue aux Ours. What remains 
of that street, retaining the same name, is to be found 
not far from where the Boulevard de Sebastopol is dia- 
gonally crossed by the Rue de Turbigo. It was there 
that Porthos, seeking to solve the problem of his equip- 
ment, went to dine with Madame Coquenard, her hus- 
band, and the ravenous clerks. The studies of old Paris 
of M. Franklin throw additional light on the humours of 
the feast. Forks, which came into usage among the 
nobility in the beginning of the seventeenth century, 
did not find their way into the households of the hour- 



TRAIL OF MUSKETEERS AND OTHERS 57 

geoisie until the beginning of the eighteenth, so the huge 
and fastidious Musketeer was reduced to employing his 
fingers in gobbling down the distasteful repast. 

Dumas may have occasionally played ** ducks and 
drakes" with history. But in the study of his settings 
he exercised a care and pursuit of accuracy with which 
he is seldom credited. It might be supposed that a 
man of his abounding imagination would trouble himself 
little about documentary research or local colour at 
first hand. As a matter of fact, he had a passion for 
investigating the places with which his books were con- 
cerned. *'I cannot," he said, "make either a book or a 
play on localities I have not seen." For "Monte 
Cristo," not only the island itself, but Marseilles and the 
Chateau dTf had to be revisited. "Les Trois Mous- 
quetaires" involved going to Boulogne and Bethune. 
The background of the first incarnation was the Latin 
Quarter section, especially the streets between the 
Luxembourg and the Place Saint-Sulpice. The trail 
often carried beyond the river, such as when the ad- 
venture which D'Artagnan regretted to the end of his 
life, the trick played on Milady, led him to the structure 
in the Place Royale, now the Place des Vosges, in which 
Victor Hugo was to live, and Dumas to visit more than 
two hundred years later; there was in the Rue de la 
Harpe the ceaseless clatter of troopers riding between 
the Luxembourg and the Louvre; but to be in the heart 
of the land of "The Three Musketeers" one does not 
have to travel very far away from a comfortable table 
at Foyot's. 

Between 1625 and 1645 the scene of action in Paris 



58 



THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 



changed, moving from the south bank of the Seine to the 
north. D'Artagnan, travelHng with the current of 
Hfe, found lodgings in the "Auberge de la Chevrette" 

kept by the pretty 
Flemish Madeleine in 
the Rue Tiquetonne. 
It is the Rue Tique- 
tonne to-day, arching 
from the Rue Mont- 
martre to the Rue de 
Turbigo, and there was, 
until a short time ago 
at least, a certain Hotel 
de Picardie, which car- 
ried with it a suggestion 
of the astute and pros- 
perous Planchet, As 
lieutenant of the King's 
Musketeers D'Artag- 
nan's activities called 
for a residence in this 
part of the city. The action of "Vingt Ans Apres" 
begins in the Palais Royal, which was then known 
as the Palais Cardinal. It sweeps up and down the 
Rue Saint-Honore, and takes d'Artagnan to the 
Bastille there to release temporarily the Count de 
Rochefort, his evil genius of the early days. Starting 
the search for Aramis the Gascon wisely looks first for 
Bazin and finds that worthy acting in the capacity of 
beadle in Notre Dame. In the Rue des Lombards, 
which in the seventeenth century was invaded by the 




D ARTAGNAN S LODGING 



TRAIL OF MUSKETEERS AND OTHERS 59 

grocers and spice dealers who hold it to the present day, 
Planchet was growing rich and living over his shop at 
the sign of "Le Pilon d'Or." The favourite duelHng 
place was no longer the point by the Luxembourg gar- 
dens where met the Rue Vaugirard and the Rue Cas- 
sette. It had shifted to the Place Royale of an earlier 
century. There, with anguished mistrust in their 
hearts, Athos and Aramis of the party of the Fronde, 
and Porthos and D'Artagnan of the side of theQueen and 
the Cardinal, met to come to a definite understanding. 
The ties of the glorious past of their youth were too 
strong. When they parted they had adopted forever 
the motto "One for all, and all for one." Enough of 
the city of the Musketeers. But the trail is not to end 
there. In another chapter, to paraphrase Stevenson, 
we shall say: **Come, D'Artagnan, once again we shall 
ride together to Belle-Isle!" 



V. THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 

The Paris of Opening Paragraphs — The Rue Lesdiguieres — 
The Happily Forgotten Novels — Balzac as Law Student and 
Publisher — In the Rue Visconti — The Secret of Achievement — • 
The ''Hotel des Haricots" — The Hidden Chambers — "Les 
Jardies" — The "Maison Vauquer" — The Faubourg Saint- 
Germain — The Rue du Doyenne — the Haunts of Cesar Birotteau. 

IF ALL copies, In all languages, of all the books of 
the "Comedie Humalne" were to be deleted of 
everything but the opening paragraphs, there 
would still remain a Paris of Balzac worthy of serious 
consideration and study. For so closely was narrative 
woven into the very fibre of Paris that the logical way 
of beginning was by the setting of the definite scene. 
To illustrate by reference to certain of the most widely 
known books: In *'Le Pere Gorlot/' the first sentence 
informs us that "Mme. Vauquer {nee de Conflans) 
had for forty years kept a pension hourgeoise in the Rue 
Neuve-Salnte-Genevieve, between the Latin Quarter 
and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel." *'La Peau de 
Chagrin" plunges the reader at once with Raphael 
into the Palais Royal and the gambling den where he 
staked and lost. *'Le Cousin Pons" is first presented 
walking along the Boulevard des Italiens, "with his 
head bent down, as if tracking someone." The Rue 
Saint-Honore, near the Place Vendome, is the opening 

60 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 6i 

note of "The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau." The 
pompous Crevel, in the uniform of a captain of the 
National Guard, is being driven down the Rue de 
rUniversite as the curtain rises for "La Cousine Bette." 
Nor are these chance streets and neighbourhoods. Just 
one hundred years have passed since November, 1819, 
when the story of "Le Pere Goriot" began, yet if the 
American visitor in Paris will seek out the Rue Neuve- 
Sainte-Genevieve, now the Rue Tournefort, and pass 
through the gateway of No. 24, he will realize that no 
other spot on earth could have served as the setting for 
the drama involving the French Lear, and the evil 
schemes of Vautrin, alias "Trompe-la-mort." 

To begin this survey of Balzac's Paris with a note 
imitative of the Balzac note, turn to the novelist's first 
attic, which was at the top of the old house No. 9 Rue 
Lesdiguieres. The Rue Lesdiguieres still exists. It is 
near the Place de la Bastille, and runs from the Rue 
Saint-Antoine to the Rue de la Cerisaie, crossing the 
Boulevard Henri IV on the way. But the house is gone; 
demolished in 1866 to make way for the spacious avenue 
that sweeps across an end of the Isle Saint-Louis and 
serves as the connecting link between the boulevards of the 
right bank and the Boulevard Saint-Germain. To use 
Balzac's own words in "Facino Cane," "I was then liv- 
ing in a small street you probably do not know, the Rue 
des Lesdiguieres. It commences at the Rue Saint-An- 
toine, opposite a fountain near the Place de la Bastille, 
and issues in the Rue de la Cerisaie. Love of knowl- 
edge had driven me into a garret, where I worked 
during the night, and spent the day in a neighbouring 



62 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

library, that of Monsieur. When it was fine, I took rare 
walks on the Bourdon Boulevard." 

Balzac speaks of the "Library of Monsieur." It is 
abit of affectation comparable to his insistence on the 
aristocratic prefix to his name. It is the Library of the 
Arsenal, after the Bibliotheque Nationale the richest 
of all Paris Hbraries; begun by Francois I, rebuilt by 
the Valois kings; enlarged by Henri IV; and occupied 
as a residence by Henri's grand master of artillery. 
Sully. Among the treasures still to be found there are 
the cross-examination of the Marchioness of Brinvil- 
liers, and the death certificate of the Man in the Iron 
Mask; while a curator of recent years was M. Funck- 
Brentano, who has popularly presented to the world so 
many of the dramas and intrigues of French history. 
It was in the hbrary by day and the garret by night 
that Balzac began that Hfe of terrific toil in which he 
persisted until the end. To those years belong the 
happily forgotten novels of his prentice hand: "Le Cen- 
tenaire," "L'Heritage de Birague," "Wann Chlone," 
*'Jean Louis," "Le Vicaire des Ardennes" — to recall a 
few — issued under such grotesque pen names as: "Hor- 
ace de Saint-Aubin" and "Lord R'hoone," the latter 
an anagram of Honore. To the garret he took his scant 
supply of food, and carried up from the court pump the 
bucket of water needed for the making of the cofi^ee 
that was to sustain him through the long nights of pen 
work. At No. 9 Rue des Lesdiguieres, where he lived 
for fifteen months, he was digging his too-early grave 
and building the foundations of his immortal labour. 
His only relaxations were the long walks that gave him 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 63 

his amazing knowledge of every corner of the Paris of 
his time, and the hours of building day dreams as he 
contemplated the city from the heights of the cemetery 
of Pere Lachaise. 

That was the period of Balzac the ineffectual novelist. 
Before that there had been Balzac the law student. 
The next incarnation 
was Balzac the pub- 
lisher and printer. 
There is, near the 
Ecole des Beaux Arts, 
between the Rue 
Bonaparte and the 
Rue de Seine, a Httle 
street so narrow that 
two vehicles cannot 
pass in it. It is now 
the Rue Visconti. A 
century ago it was 
known as the Rue des 
Marais Saint-Ger- 
main. There, at No. 
17, a house that was 
later occupied by the 
studio of Paul Dela- . 

roche, Balzac established the printing press that ruined 
him. His first idea was to bring out compact edi- 
tions of the complete works of different authors 
in one volume, and he began with Moliere and La 
Fontaine. That venture alone saddled him with 15,000 
francs of debt. Finally, about the beginning of 1828, 




THE RUE VISCONTI 



64 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

printing press and type foundry were sold at a ruinous 
sacrifice, and Balzac faced life with obligations amount- 
ing to 120,000 francs hanging over him. Of this 
money 37,600 francs had been loaned by the novehst's 
mother, and 45,000 francs by Madame de Berny. 
The latter sum was paid back in full in 1836, the year 
of Madame de Berny's death. 

As a printer Balzac had lived over his shop. In what 
is now the Rue Visconti he began "Les Chouans." It 
was the first book to bear his real name as author, and he 
finished it in his next home, which was at No. 2 Rue de 
Tournon, a street which has undergone few if any 
changes since Balzac dwelt thpre. Then, in 1831, he 
moved to the Rue Cassini, near the Observatoire. A 
companion there was Jules Sandeau, who had recently 
broken away from George Sand. Despite the separa- 
tion Madame Dudevant was in the habit of paying 
occasional visits to the Rue Cassini, and Balzac returned 
these visits, puffing up the stairs of the five-storied 
house of the Quai Saint-Michel at the top of which she 
lived. He called to advise her about her writing, but 
soon turned to the more congenial topic of his own work. 
"Ah, I have found something else! You will see! You 
will see! A splendid idea! A situation! A dialogue! 
Nobody has ever done anything like it!" George Sand 
listened patiently, and as reward Balzac portrayed her 
with kindly flattery as Mile, des Touches, in "Beatrix." 

In the Rue Cassini Balzac lived for a number of 
years, there writing, among others, "La Peau de Cha- 
grin," "Eugenie Grander," "Le Lys dans la Vallee," 
"La Medecin de Campagne," "Le Pere Goriot," "Le 



THE PARIS OF HONOR^ DE BALZAC 65 

Cure de Tours," ** Cesar Birotteau," "Louis Lambert," 
*'La Duchesse de Langeais," "La Femme de Trente 
Ans," and the first part of "Illusions Perdues." It was 
during this period that Werdet became his publisher, 
and drew that vivid, unforgetable picture of his daily 
life when he was in the full swing of creative invention: 

He usually goes to bed at eight o'clock, after a light dinner, washed 
down by a glass of Vouvray. He is again at his desk by two in the 
morning. He writes from that time till six, refreshing himself oc- 
casionally with coffee from a pot kept in the fireplace. At six he 
has his bath, in which he remains for an hour, meditating. Then I 
call; I am admitted to bring proofs, to take away the corrected ones, 
and to wrest, if possible, fresh manuscript from him. From nine 
he writes till noon, when he breakfasts on two boiled eggs and some 
bread, and from one to six the labour of correction goes on again. 
This life lasts for six weeks or two months during which time he 
refuses to see even his most intimate friends; then he plunges again 
into the ordinary affairs of Hfe, or mysteriously disappears, to be 
next heard of in some distant part of France, or perhaps in Corsica, 
Sardinia, or Italy. 

There was one Paris residence of Balzac which must 
not be entirely forgotten, albeit it was one whose hos- 
pitality the novelist neither invited nor enjoyed. That 
was the old prison of the National Guard, known flip- 
pantly as the "Hotel des Haricots." Balzac, unlike 
the Crevel of his "La Cousine Bette," loathed the com- 
pulsory service, and evaded it on all possible occasions. 
Once he hid himself in a remote quarter under the name 
of "Madame Durand." A friend, learning his where- 
abouts, sent him a letter addressed: "Madame Durand, 
nee Balzac." Again and again Balzac matched his 



66 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

wits against those of the searching authorities, but 
occasionally he was caught, and forced to serve a term 
of punishment which was annoying though involving no 
great personal hardship. 

Even after he moved to the Rue des Batailles, in the 
Passy section, then a retired and country-like suburb 
of Paris, Balzac retained the rooms in the Rue Cassini 
as a refuge from over-insistent creditors. The Rue des 
Batailles quarters were described in "La Fille aux Yeux 
d'Or." They were very luxurious, but connected with 
them were two secret chambers, one fitted up with a 
camp bedstead and the other with a writing table. 
Concealed doors led to these hiding places which were 
used whenever Balzac was pursued by emissaries of the 
Garde Nationale, creditors, or enraged editors. Even 
Passy was not far enough away to discourage the 
visits of these pests; so in 1838 Balzac bought three 
acres of ground at Ville-d'Avray, a little village near 
Sevres, on the road to Versailles. There, at No. 14 
Rue Gambetta, "Les Jardies" may be seen to-day, a 
shrine to the statesman Gambetta, who died there, and 
no less a shrine to the creator of the **Comedie Hu- 
maine." 

"There are in Paris certain streets," wrote Balzac 
in "Ferragus" — "as dishonoured as can be any man con- 
victed of infamy; then there are noble streets, also 
streets that are simply honest, also young streets con- 
cerning whose morality the public has not yet formed 
any opinion; then there are murderous streets, streets 
older than the oldest possible dov/agers, estimable 
streets, streets that are always clean, streets that are 



THE PARIS OF HONORS DE BALZAC 67 

always dirty, workingmen's streets, students' streets, 
and mercantile streets. In short, the streets of Paris 
have human qualities, and impress us by their physi- 
ognomy with certain ideas against which we are defence- 
less." Given the seer-like vision of a Balzac that is the 
story of the streets of any great city that boasts a his- 
tory. 

The trail that leads to the homes associated with 
Balzac's own life is of minor significance to that which 
follows the footsteps of the men and women who live 
in the pages of his "Comedie Humaine." For the 
Hulots, Marneffes, Goriots, Rastignacs, Nucingens, 
and Rubempres stalk the streets of Lutetia, while the 
dust of the great romancer lies yonder in Pere Lachaise. 
But though the types remain, imagination has to be 
brought freely into play for the reconstruction of the 
old stage setting. For most of it was long ago pickaxed 
out of sight, swept away in the course of the gigantic 
changes wrought by Baron Haussmann during the 
Second Empire. Such Balzacian structures as still 
exist and retain the flavour of the Paris of 1830-40 
are almost all to be found on the south side of the Seine. 
Take the most vivid of them all, the Maison Vauquer, 
called by Henry James the "most portentous setting 
of the scene in all the literature of fiction." 

There is no American with four days to spend in 
Paris who will not find time to visit the gardens of the 
Luxembourg, and thence walk up the Rue Soufflot for 
a glimpse of the Pantheon. Let the reader, for the 
moment, assume that as his situation, and continue the 
journey a little farther, veering off to the right, and 



68 



THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 



passing down the Rue de I'Estrapade. A moment's 
glance at a map will make it all plain sailing. Where 
the Rue de I'Estrapade comes to an abrupt end in a 
little triangle, turn to the right and follow the Rue 
Tournefort, which in Balzac's day was known by its 
original name of Rue Neuve Sainte-Genevieve. Now, 
as then, it seems to creep timidly over the brow of the 
historic hill, then sharply to break into descent as it 

approaches the Rue de 
I'Arbalete. Now as 
then the pomp and glit- 
ter of Paris seem far 
away. Stop before the 
house that bears the 
number 24. In the 
course of many visits the 
writer has never seen the 
door leading into the 
courtyard when it was 
not half open in apparent 
welcome. Push and 

THE MAISON VAUQUER — 'THE MOST ^, - 

PORTENTOUS SETIING OF THE SCENE IN CntCr. i hCre, tO StUUy 

ALL THE LITERATURE OF FICTION"- J^|^ ^^^ UtmOSt ftCe- 

Henry James 

dom, is the little gar- 
den where Vautrin poured his insidious poison into the 
too willing ear of Eugene. From a corner which has 
been converted into a storehouse for wood, the Pilgrim 
peering through dingy windows, looks into the very 
dining room where "Trompe-la-mort" was taken by 
the soldiers and the police, and turned his terrible 
eyes on his betrayers. Mile. Michonneau and *'Fil- 




~i^^' 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 69 

de-Soie." Fiction possesses no more convincing pile 
of brick and mortar. 

That shabby pension hourgeoise in the Rue Neuve 
Sainte-Genevieve where Goriot suffered and died was in 
sharp contrast to the surroundings of the adored 
daughters for whom he stripped himself to the last sou. 
From far across the Seine these daughters came in 
stately equipages, not through a sense of filial devotion, 
but in the greedy hope of being able to wheedle some 
fresh sacrifice. The Comtesse de Restaud, Anastasie, 
lived in the Rue du Helder, a street, then fashionable, 
running from the Boulevard des Itahens to the Boule- 
vard Haussmann. Madame de Nucingen, Delphine, 
lived in the Rue Saint-Lazare. From there she and 
Eugene de Rastignac drove to the Palais Royal in order 
that he, a beginner, might risk a hundred francs for 
her in the hope of winning enough to meet her imme- 
diate needs. Near the Theatre Fran^ais the carriage 
stopped, and Eugene, alighting, found his way to a hell 
in a near-by street. The number above the door was g, 
and Rastignac, staking on number 21, the figure of his 
own age, and restaking on the red, carried back to his 
lady the sum of seven thousand francs. 

In Balzac's day the quarter of Paris chosen by wealth, 
as opposed to sang azur^ which clung to its Faubourg 
Saint-Germain, was in the neighbourhood of the present 
Gare Saint-Lazare. The favourite street was the Rue de 
la Pepiniere, continued by the Rue Saint-Lazare. An- 
other fashionable street was the Rue de Provence, and 
there Balzac placed the house of the seven courtesans, 
of "Les Comediens sans le Savoir.'* The present Opera 



70 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

and its Place did not then exist, nor was there any 
Avenue de I'Opera. One of the cluster of narrow streets 
then lying between the boulevards and the Louvre was 
the Rue de Langlade where, in "Splendeurs et Miseres 
des Courtisanes," Vautrin found Esther la Torpille at 
death's door. 

In the beginning of "Une Double Famille" Balzac 
emphasized the darkness and unhealthiness of the region 
about the old church of Saint-Merri. In that section 
were the Rue des Lombards where Matifat presided 
over the wholesale drug business; and the Rue Aubry 
le Boucher, once the Rue des Cinq Diamants, where 
Popinot of *'Cesar Birotteau" had his shop. The 
house described in "Une Double Famille" was in the 
Rue Tourniquet-Saint-Jean, which was only five feet 
wide at its broadest, and was cleaned only when it 
rained. 

But it is to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, now little 
more than a name, that one turns for the shades of the 
aristocratic women of the "Comedie Humaine." There 
was Rastignac's relative, the Vicomtesse de Beauseaunt, 
one of the queens of fashion, whose hotel was thought 
to be the pleasantest in all the Faubourg, and where 
one found the best-dressed women of the great world 
of Paris — Lady Brandon, the Duchesse de Langeais, the 
Comtesse de Kergarouet, the Comtesse Ferraud, Mme. 
de Lanty, Mme. de Serizy, the Marquise de Listomere, 
the Duchesse de Carigliano, the Marquise d'Aiglemont, 
the Marquise d'Espard, Mme. Firmiani, and the Duch- 
esse de Maufrigneuse, attended by the gilded and in- 
solent youth of the period, the Maulincourts, Maximes 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 71 

de Trailles, Ronquerolles, Ajuda-Pintos, and Van- 
denesses. Even the tradition of the quarter has been 
shaken by the Great War, and for years before August, 
1914, Httle but tradition remained. 

On the south bank of the river, almost opposite where 
the Palace of the Tuileries once stood, there is a small 
street, the Rue de Beaune, running from the Quai 
Voltaire to the Rue de I'Universite. It is reached by 
crossing the Pont Royal and turning to the left. Where 
the Rue de Beaune abuts on the Quai Voltaire is the 
house in which Voltaire died, and from which his body, 
wrapped in a dressing gown and held up by straps, 
like a traveller asleep, was taken in a coach for inter- 
ment outside Paris at the Abbey of Scellieres in Cham- 
pagne. Next to that house there was until a few years 
ago an antiquary's shop, which had been there in Bal- 
zac's day, and which had often tempted the novelist to 
extravagances that made heavier and heavier the bur- 
den of his debts. That shop was the background of 
the first act of "La Peau de Chagrin," for the opening 
scene in the Palais Royal gambling house was the brief- 
est of prologues. It was with the determination of 
self-destruction that Raphael de Valentin descended 
the staircase of No. 36 after the turn of the cards had 
reduced him to penury. He left the galleries of the 
Palais Royal, walked as far as the Rue Saint-Honore, 
crossed the Tuileries gardens, and then the Pont Royal 
to the left bank. It was the spectacle of Raphael look- 
ing down at the swirling waters that moved Balzac to 
the often-quoted saying that the newspaper paragraph: 
"Yesterday, at four o'clock, a young woman threw 



72 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

herself into the Seine from the Pont des Arts," con- 
tained the essence of the greatest human drama. But 
Raphael, shuddering at the visions conjured up by his 
burning imagination, crossed the quai, and entered the 
antiquary's shop where he found the magic skin which 
granted every wish, but with every wish decreased in 
size, diminishing, with its shrinking, the Hfe of its posses- 
sor. 

On the site occupied by the present Sorbonne, at the 
corner of the Place de la Sorbonne and the Rue Neuve 
de Richelieu, was the famous Flicoteau of ''Illusions 
Perdues." In that restaurant of old Bohemia where 
Lucien de Rubempre met Lousteau and d'Arthez, a 
dinner of three dishes and a carafon of wine might be 
had for a franc. Not French Bohemians only gathered 
there. Thackeray knew it and wrote of it in "Philip," 
and Bulwer-Lytton described it at length. 

Raphael de Valentin lived in a dilapidated hotel 
garni in the Rue des Cordiers known as the Hotel Saint- 
Quentin. ''Nothing could be more horrible than that 
garret with its dirty, yellow walls, smelling of poverty, 
its sloping ceiling, and the loosened tiles, affording 
glimpses of the sky." Once Jean Jacques Rousseau 
had lived in that hostelry, or in a similar one close by, 
a fact which served somewhat to reconcile Raphael 
to the misery of his surroundings. Approximately the 
spot is easy to locate, for it was near the corner of the 
still-existing Rue de Cluny. But the Hotel Saint- 
Quentin and the Rue des Cordiers have long since 
vanished, swept away to make room for certain new 
buildings of the Sorbonne. 




The old Pont Neuf. This bridge, the oldest of ail spanning the Seine, 
has been to French fiction what the Rialto was to the gossips of mediaeval 
Venice. Balzac said: "Drama's essence is in the words: 'Yesterday, at 
four o'clock, a woman threw herself into the river from the Pont Neuf.' " 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 73 

Like the Hotel Saint-Quentin, the Rue du Doyenne 
has to depend on imagination for reconstruction. It 
was in the Rue du Doyenne that, in "La Cousine 
Bette" Baron Hulet first saw Valerie MarnefFe, and that 
meeting and the old quarter as pictured by Balzac are 
fascinating even in the memory. Recall the words : 

Between the little gate leading to the Pont du Carrousel and the 
Rue du Musee, everyone having come to Paris, were it but a few 
days, must have seen a dozen houses with a decayed frontage where 
the dejected owners have attempted no repairs, the remains of an 
old block of buildings of which the destruction was begun at the 
time Napoleon contemplated the completion of the Louvre. This 
street and the blind-alley known as the Impasse du Doyenne are 
the only passages into this gloomy and forsaken block, inhabited 
perhaps by ghosts, for there is never any one to be seen. The pave- 
ment is much below the footway of the Rue du Musee, on a level 
with that of the Rue Froidmanteau. Thus, half sunken by the 
raising of the soil, these houses are also wrapped in the perpetual 
shadow cast by the lofty buildings of the Louvre, darkened on that 
side by the northern blast. Darkness, silence, an icy chill, and the 
cavernous depth of the soil combine to make these houses a kind of 
crypt, tombs of the living. Driving in z fiacre past this spot, and 
chancing to look down the little Rue du Doyenne, a shudder freezes 
the soul, and we wonder who can live there, and what things may 
be done there at night, at an hour when the alley is a cut-throat pit, 
and the vices of Paris run riot under the cloak of darkness. 

That block of black old eighteenth-century houses, 
which in Balzac's time knew the presence of Gautier 
and Gavarni, long since fell before the pickaxe of im- 
provement. But the traveller of to-day, taking his 
place in the Place du Carrousel by the statues of 
Gambetta and of Lafayette, and drinking in with 



74 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

his eyes the marvellous view to the west, through 
the gardens of the Tuileries, across the Place de la 
Concorde, up the sweep of the Champs-Elysees, past 
the Rond-Point, and on to the great Arch, is stand- 
ing on the exact ground once trod by the dainty feet 
of la Marncffe. 

There is, at the corner of the Rue Saint-Honore and 
the Rue Castiglione, a hostelry retaining something of 
the old French flavour, known as the Hotel de France 
et Choiseul. With the virtues or the shortcomings of 
its cuisine and management the present discussion has 
nothing to do, the interest at issue being that just 
across the street from the hotel, on the north side of the 
way, was the retail establishment of M. Cesar Birotteau. 
There Cesar began his Paris life as an errand boy for 
the Ragons, there he was carried w^ounded and lay hid- 
den after the 13 Vendemiaire; there he made the fortune 
from his "Eau Carminative," and his "Double Pate 
des Sultanes" that he lost in speculation in waste 
ground about the Madeleine. Looking back on that 
venture we realize that It was Cesar's luck and not his 
judgment that was at fault, for land about the Made- 
leine is now as valuable as any in Paris. In outward 
aspect the Rue Saint-Honore, v/Ith its narrow pave- 
ment and its tall, thin houses, Is much the same as It 
was when Balzac, In the fever of creation, Irritably 
dismissed such topics of conversation as politics, the 
Opera, or the Bourse, saying: "Come. Let us discuss 
real people! I must tell you about Cesar Birotteau 
and the new perfume that he has just Invented." But 
the opening up of the Avenue de I'Opera, which took 



THE PARIS OF HONORE DE BALZAC 75 

place since Balzac's day, wrought vast changes in the 
business conditions of this section of the city. Cesar's 
establishment to-day would probably be found in the 
Rue de la Paix, or on one of the boulevards not too far 
from the Place de I'Opera. 




VI. SINISTER STREETS 

Slums of Paris — Ancient Streets — The Old Cite of "Les Mys~ 
teres de Paris" — The Personal Eugene Sue — " Les Mysteresy* 
and " Le Juif Errant" as Serials — The Underworld of 1840 — 
Caverns in the Cours la Reine — Paul de Kock — His Amazing 
Popularity — The Tribute of Major Pendennis — The Paris of 
Emile Gaboriau. 



IT WAS the American, Richard Harding Davis, who, 
in "About Paris,*' made the extraordinary state- 
ment that Paris was a city without slums. Enter- 
taining as Mr. Davis's book was, the author's knowledge 
of his subject was, above all at the time of writing, ex- 
tremely limited. What he undoubtedly meant was 

76 



SINISTER STREETS ^^ 

that Paris slums were not exactly like the slums of New 
York or Philadelphia. But reading in any explanation 
whatever the statement was enough to have stirred 
Honore de Balzac and Victor Hugo, not to mention 
Eugene Sue, in their graves. If the outward and visible 
manifestation of the slum means the dim, narrow, tor- 
tuous street, the dingy, moldering structure, and the 
broken, uneven roadway, old Paris was little more than 
one vast slum. And, though the American traveller 
who elects to spend all his time on the brilliant boule- 
vards, or in the newer city that stretches away to the 
west, may never discover it, much of old Paris remains. 
To find these sinister streets is a matter of no great 
difficulty nor does it call for the expenditure of any vast 
amount of time or energy. In the course of that famil- 
iar journey along the line of the grand boulevard that, 
under various names, stretches from the Madeleine to 
the Bastille, turn, when about half-way, ;to the 
southward, and plunge into the labyrinth where 
the old Temple Quarter and the old Marais 
Quarter jumble together. Some of these streets knew 
the Valois; many of them, within three-quarters of a 
century, have bristled with barricades. In that process 
which has come to be called the "Haussmannising" 
of Paris, the Third Napoleon was actuated by the desire 
to make the capital more beautiful and sanitary, and 
also to raze thoroughfares so easy to put in a state of 
defence from wall to wall that they were a direct incite- 
ment to insurrection. For atmosphere seek the short 
Rue de Venise, which is within a stone's throw of the 
broad Boulevard de Sebastopol. Ten years ago there 



78 



THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 



was said to be somewhere about here a famous thieves' 
restaurant; a sort of burglars' "Maxim's," although the 
apache is not so likely to lurk in this quarter, preferring 
the slopes of Montmartre, or the shadows of the Buttes 
Chaumont or of the Bois de Boulogne. In the summer 

of 1917 the writer 
could find no trace of 
"The Guardian 
Angel," which per- 
haps bore out the 
story that, in the 
perilous days of late 
August, 1914, General 
Gallieni dealt swiftly 
and summarily with 
Casque d'Or and his 
pals. But it is one of 
the most ancient of 
Paris streets, this 
twisting, ill-smelling, 
hideous, yet quaint 
lane with the over- 
hanging houses and 
the primitive lanterns. There is a flavour to the very 
names of some of the streets about here; the Rue des 
Francs-Bourgeois, the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, the 
Rue Taille-Pain, the Rue Brise-Miche, the Rue Pierre- 
au-Lard, and the Rue Pirouette, which derived its 
appellation from the old iron wheel pierced with holes 
for the head and arms of murderers, panders, blas- 
phemers, and vagabonds, and turned every half hour in 




RUE DE VENISE 



SINISTER STREETS 79 

a different direction, exposing its victims to new points 
of public derision. 

Nor is it in this quarter alone, a quarter lying between 
the Halles Centrales to the west and the Archives 
Nationales to the east, that the sinister streets are to 
be found. Climb the hill of Montmartre for the 
splendid church that crowns the summit, and the vast 
panorama that Paris below presents, but do not grudge 
the half hour additional to visit what remain of the 
curious, half-country lanes that run slantingly between 
the high stone walls. On the South Bank of the Seine, 
from the Jardin des Plantes, zig-zag in over the trail of 
Javert's pursuit of Jean Valjean through old world 
thoroughfares that lead past the foot of the Mount of 
Saint-Genevieve. Once, between this quarter and the 
quarter that lies to the east of the Central Markets, 
there was another quarter where the streets were sinis- 
ter. That was the Cite as it was in the first half of the 
nineteenth century, a region of which the most clearly 
staked fiction claim is that of Eugene Sue and his 
"Mysteries of Paris," which has been called the "Uncle 
Tom's Cabin" of socialism; just as Sue's other novel 
which has endured, "The Wandering Jew," has been 
called the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" of anticlericalism. 

The veracious author of "An Englishman in Paris" — 
which, incidentally, is one of the most instructive and 
entertaining of books of its kind despite the fact that it 
purported to deal at first hand with events many of 
which happened years before Mr. Albert Vandam came 
into the world — described the famous creator of "Les 
Mysteres de Paris" and "Le Juif Errant" as the most 



8o THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

pompous oi poseurs y who, having written a rousing good 
story for the sake of the tale itself, found himself un- 
expectedly elevated to a pedestal as a champion of the 
cause of proletaire, and blandly accepted the motives 
attributed to him and the accruing honours. In com- 
pany, according to the "Englishman," M. Eugene Sue 
was in the habit of assuming a far-off air, as if occupied 
deeply by problems beyond the ken of those about him. 
His very dandyism of manner and attire was offensive. 
Once he complained of cleaned gloves. Their odour 
made him ill. " But, my friend,'* said Alfred de Musset, 
"they don't smell worse than the dens that you de- 
scribe for us. Don't you ever visit them.?" 

"The Mysteries of Paris" and "The Wandering 
Jew" are still justly held to be among the colossal 
narratives of all time. But their author is now littl6 
more than a name. Yet there was a time, in the pro- 
ductive decade of 1840-50, when Sue, as a literary force, 
was ranked with the elder Dumas and the great Balzac, 
probably rather higher than the latter. George Sand 
spoke of his work as "the Menagerie," but confessed 
that she could not miss a daily instalment. When Wil- 
kie Collins's "The Woman in White" was appearing 
in All the Year Round, the streets approaching the 
office of publication on the day of issue were thronged 
with people waiting to buy the next number. Sue's 
serial popularity — the "Mysteries" appeared in the 
Journal des Dehats and " Le Juif Errant" in the Con- 
stitutional — far surpassed that of Wilkie Collins. It 
was impossible to purchase outright a copy of the paper. 
"No, Monsieur," the news vendor would explain, "we 



SINISTER STREETS 8i 

rent them out at ten sous the half hour, the time re- 
quired to read M. Sue's story." 

There is an age at which one should read for the first 
time *'The Mysteries of Paris" and "The Wandering 
Jew," just as there is an age at which one should first 
read "The Leather-Stocking Tales," and "Monte 
Cristo," and Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme," 
and a score more. When the world is young what a 
thrill there is in the sinister streets, and, above all, in 
the startling names of the characters of the strange 
underworld of that Paris of the eighteen-thirties — "the 
Schoolmaster," "the Slasher," the Skeleton," "the 
Ogress," "Sweet-throat"! The very first paragraph of 
the "Mysteries" plunges the reader into a world as 
amazing as the Bagdad of the "Arabian Nights." The 
years fall away, correct ojEficial buildings and broad open 
spaces disappear, and in their place is the old Cite 
with its tortuous thoroughfares nearly as they were 
when the hunchback Quasimodo peered down on them 
from the towers of Notre Dame. Four bridges cross 
the Seine from the north bank to the Cite : the Pont Neuf, 
the Pont au Change, the Pont Notre Dame, and the 
Pont d'Arcole. It was across the Pont au Change — not 
the spacious bridge of to-day which dates from about 
i860, but the old bridge, one of the most ancient in 
Paris, deriving its name from the shops of the money- 
changers and goldsmiths flanking it — that Rodolphe 
found his way to battle with the "Slasher," to rescue 
"Fleur-de-Marie," and make the acquaintance of the 
den of the "Ogress." Before the changes which trans- 
formed this part of Paris the quarter was, as Sue de- 



82 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

scribed it, one of dark, narrow streets, where malefactors 
swarmed in the drinking dens, of sooty houses with 
sweaty walls, and so overhung as almost to touch eaves. 
The tapis-franc bearing the name of the "White Rab- 
bit," and over which Mother Ponisse presided, occupied 
the ground floor of a lofty house in the middle of the 
Rue aux Feves "The Rue de la Juiverie, the Rue aux 
Feves, the Rue de la Calandre, the Rue des Mar- 
mousets. " M. Georges Cain, Curator of the Carnavalet 
Museum and of the Historic Collections of the City of 
Paris has recorded, "for centuries this quarter had been 
the haunt of the lowest prostitution; there, too, dyers 
had established their many-coloured tubs; and blue, 
red, or green streams flowed down these streets with 
their old Parisian names." 

But the slums of old Paris with which M. Eugene 
Sue's novels had to do were not confined to the Cite. 
We are too much inclined to overlook the sweeping 
changes that a century has wrought even in old world 
cities. The American traveller of the present would 
stare if put down in the Place de la Concorde of 1830. 
In what is now the Cours la Reine, stretching away to 
the west along the banks of the river, there was, until 
1840, when the last of them^ disappeared, a number of 
subterranean caverns, low buildings with cracked walls 
and tiled roofs usually covered with slimy green moss, 
and, attached to the main buildings, wretched wooden 
hovels, serving as sheds and storehouses. One of these 
taverns was the Bleeding Heart, kept by " Bras Rouge," 
and into its cellar Rodolphe was thrust by the "School- 
master" to await death by the rising of the tide from the 



SINISTER STREETS 83 

near-by Seine waters. The stone walls of the cave were 
found hideously spattered with the blood and brains of 
"La Chouette" (Screech-Owl) when the police officers 
entered after the vicious child Tortillard had pushed 
her down the steps into the clutches of the bhnd 
** Schoolmaster" chained to a rock in the cellar floor. 

As befits its sweeping title, the trail of "Les Mysteres 
de Paris" is all over the city as it was in 1838, and also 
reaches out through the environs. By following the 
Rue de Rivoli eastward in the direction of the Bastille, 
and turning north into the Marais at a corner opposite 
the Hotel de Ville, we enter the Rue du Temple, which, 
at its other end, intersects with the Rue Turbigo just 
below where the circle of great boulevards, between the 
Boulevard Saint-Martin and the Boulevard du Temple, 
is broken by the spacious Place de la Republique. In 
this street dwelt the family Morel and the respectable 
Pipelet. Since 1838 the thoroughfare has been changed 
and greatly widened. The old Temple Market, of 
which only a part remains, was a favourite bit for de- 
scription by the French romancers of the early half of 
the nineteenth century. Of the Temple itself, the chief 
stronghold in France of the Knights Templar of the 
Middle Ages, the Tower, where the royal family was 
imprisoned in 1792 and 1793, was demohshed by 
Napoleon I in 181 1, but part remained until the Hauss- 
mannising of Paris under Napoleon III. In the days 
of "The Mysteries of Paris," toward the middle of the 
Rue du Temple, near a fountain which was placed in 
the angle of a large square, was an immense parallel- 
ogram built of timber, crowned by a slated roof. A long 



84 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

opening, intersecting this parallelogram in its length, 
divided it into two equal parts; these were in turn 
divided and subdivided by little lateral and transverse 
courts, sheltered from the rain by the roof of the edifice. 
In this bazaar new merchandise was generally pro- 
hibited ; but the smallest rag of any old stuff, the smallest 
piece of iron, brass, or steel, found its buyer or seller. 
Half a score blocks eastward from the Temple, in 




OLD TEMPLE MARKET 



the direction of the Bourse, may be found to-day the 
Rue du Sentier, which begins at the Rue Reaumur, is 
bisected by the Rue des Jeuneurs, and abuts on the 
Boulevard Poissoniere. It was there, in a corner house, 
that dwelt the notary, Jacques Ferrand, perhaps the 
most sinister of all the sinister characters of the complex 
tale, the evil genius of the "Mysteres de Paris " as Rodin 



SINISTER STREETS 85 

was the evil genius of "Le Juif Errant." There, under 
a garb of assumed sanctity the spider spun his webs 
and wrought his villainies until the day when he was 
enflamed and outwitted by the octoroon, Cecily. In 
the early part of the century this was a neighbourhood 
which drew its individuality from the gilded copper 
escutcheons of men of Ferrand's calling. Streets, even 
where they continue to exist, change materially. In- 
stitutions change less. In connection with Eugene 
Sue, there is Saint-Lazare, once a prison for women, where 
Mont Saint-Jean was put to the torture by the "She 
Wolf" and her companions, and rescued by "Fleur-de- 
Marie." But La Force belonged essentially to old 
Paris, and the prestige of Bicetre, where the "School- 
master" was seen for the last time, long since passed to 
Charenton. 

If Eugene Sue is to be regarded as the captain among 
those who have found inspiration for fiction in the 
underworld of Paris, the company he must be consid- 
ered as leading is one of well-filled ranks. The romance 
of crime has ever been a favourite subject to the reader 
of a certain kind of French feuilleton. In print, as on 
the stage, fat epiciers have found delight in blubbering 
over mimic woes and shaking their fists at imaginary 
villainies. The more complicated the plot of novel or 
melodrama has been the better it has been liked. Take, 
by way of illustration, "The Two Orphans" of d'Hen- 
nery and Cormon, which has held the stage for forty-five 
years, and will doubtless hold it for twenty years more. 
It was Brander Matthews who once said that if any one 
were to write down a description of the plot of "The 



'86 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Two Orphans'* he would have to fill a dozen pages; 
and yet such was d'Hennery's knack as a born play- 
wright that on the stage it is all evolved so lucidly and 
naturally as to be perfectly clear at every moment. If 
there was space here for a consideration of the Paris of 
the Playwright, "The Two Orphans," with its definite 
setting in eighteenth-century Lutetia, its contrast of the 
persecuted poor and the oppressive rich, would occupy 
a position somewhat analogous to that of Sue's "Les 
Mysteres de Paris" in fiction. 

Contemporaneous with Eugene Sue, and, though not 
taking himself quite so seriously as a social reformer, 
as conspicuous in his day as a chronicler of the fortunes 
of the humble, was Charles Paul de Kock. It is only 
by the retailing of anecdotes that one can convey an 
idea of what De Kock's stories once meant to readers 
not only in Paris and France, but throughout all Eu- 
rope, from London to St. Petersburg. Chateaubriand 
went to the Vatican to visit Pope Gregory XVI. "Give 
me, Vicomte," began His Holiness, "some news of my 
dear son Paul de Kock." A new ambassador presented 
his credentials to the king of the country to which he 
had been assigned. "Ah! You are just from Paris/' 
said His Majesty. "You must know the news. How 
is the health of Paul de Kock?" Honore de Balzac, 
at the height of his fame, was arrested for trespass on 
the outskirts of Paris. The presiding magistrate re- 
leased him instantly, believing him to be the author of 
"La Laitiere de Montfermeil," which he considered the 
greatest of all novels. Add a bit of Thackerayan trib- 
ute: Major Arthur Pendennis's library was confined 



SINISTER STREETS 87 

to the "Army and Navy Register,'* the "Campaigns 
of the Duke of Wellington," "Debrett's Peerage," the 
"Almanach de Gotha," and the novels of Paul de 
Kock, "which certainly make me laugh." Disraeli's 
testimony: One of the characters of "Henrietta Tem- 
ple" was arrested. A friend offered congratulations. 
"Now you can read Paul de Kock. By Jove, you are a 
lucky fellow!" All over Europe people were studying 
Parisian manners in his novels, while the author, the 
most quiet and bourgeois of men, was working away 
steadily in his little apartment on the Boulevard Saint- 
Martin, or among the trees and vineyards of his place 
at Romainville. 

It was perhaps to being the most bourgeois of men 
that he owed a large measure of his popularity. He 
has been described as a "Philistine of the Marais." He 
had the advantage of being absolutely like his readers, 
sharing their opinions, their ideas, their feelings, and 
their prejudices. Gautier once said of him that he had 
not the faintest idea of aesthetics; that, indeed, "he 
would readily have supposed, like Pradbn, that they 
were some chemical substance." For the purpose of 
the Paris trail it is enough to consider two of his books, 
"L'Homme aux Trois Culottes" and "Le Barbier de 
Paris." It was on his own parents* tragic story that he 
based the former novel. His father, a wealthy Dutch 
banker who had served in the Army of the North, was 
guillotined by the order of the Revolutionary Conven- 
tion, and his mother was thrown into prison. The Paris 
of "Le Barbier de Paris" was old Paris, the Paris of 
1630, during the reign of Louis XIII; the Paris the 



88 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

youthful Gascon D'Artagnan found, when he entered 
it astride his Rosinante. For full tribute to Paul de 
Kock as the chronicler of the streets of his much be- 
loved Lutetia through many ages turn to Theophile 
Gautier, who said: "Some of his novels have the same 
effect on me as Fenimore Cooper's 'The Last of the 
Mohicans'; I seem to read in them the story of the last 
Parisian, invaded and submerged by American civili- 
zation." 

Of Paul de Kock's Paris Theophile Gautier wrote: 
One met French people, even Parisians, in the streets. 
One could hear French spoken on that boulevard which 
was then called the Boulevard de Gand, and which is 
now called the Boulevard des Itahens. . . . The 
city was relatively very small, or at least its activity 
was restricted within certain Hmits that were seldon 
passed. The plaster elephant in which Gavroche found 
shelter raised its enormous silhouette on the Place de 
la Bastille, and seemed to forbid passers-by to go 
any farther. The Champs-Elysees, as soon as night 
fell, became more dangerous than the plain of Mara- 
thon: the most adventurous stopped at the Place de la 
Concorde. The quarter of Notre Dame de Lorette 
included only vague plots of ground or wooden fences. 
The church was not built, and one could see from the 
boulevard the Butte Montmartre, with its windmills 
and its semaphore waving its arms on the top of the 
old Tower. The Faubourg Saint-Germain went early 
to bed and its solitude was but rarely disturbed by a 
tumult of students over a play at the Odeon. 

Of the lesser men, how long the list might be made 




i CL, 



SINISTER STREETS 89 

to run! Take, at random, the name of Fortune du 
Boisgobey, or of Ponson du Terrail, who has been dub- 
bed "the Shakespeare of secret assassination," or of 
Gaston Leroux, at whose "The Myster}^ of the Yellow 
Room" and "The Perfume of the Lady in Black" we 
were thrilHng only yesterday. As conspicuous as any, 
above all when the Paris trail is to be considered, was 
Emile Gaboriau, who passed on to Conan Doyle what 
he inherited from Poe. What American of average 
reading does not owe a debt of gratitude for pleasant 
hours in company with the characters of "Monsieur 
Lecoq," ."The Honour of the Name," "The Lerouge 
Case," "File No. 113," and "The Mystery^ of Orcival?" 
Linked with a network of streets was Javert's pursuit 
of Jean Valjean and Cosette; Oliver Twist's journey 
through old London under the direction of the Artful 
Dodger that finally ended at the den of Fagin; the cab 
ride about Rouen described in "Madame Bovary" 
that was responsible for Flaubert's prosecution before 
the Tribunal Correctionnel de Paris. Of comparatively 
minor importance, but no less thrilling in the reading, is 
the story of the relentless tracking by the ambitious 
Lecoq of the purposely released assassin who had cried 
"It is the Prussians who are coming" when surrounded 
in the drinking den near the Barriere d'ltalie, through 
half the winding thoroughfares of the city to the garden 
wall of the Hotel de Sairmeuse. 

"File No. 113" is perhaps esteemed the best of the 
Gaboriau stories. It will serve to indicate how those 
tales were bound up with the stones of Paris of their 
day. The banking house of Andre Fauvel, the scene 



90 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

of the safe robbery with which the narrative began, 
was definitely placed at No. Sy Rue de Provence. The 
Rue de Provence is as close to the Boulevard Hauss- 
mann as Nassau Street is to Broadway. Nina Gypsy, 
the letters of whose name Prosper Bertomy had used 
in setting the combination of the safe, Hved at No. 39 
Rue Chaptal. That number is at the corner of the Rue 
Leonie, and almost directly opposite the entrance of the 
Grand Guignol, world famed for its association with a 
certain kind of one-act play. The Archangel, where 
Nina sought refuge, was on the Quai Saint-Michel, which 
faces the river to the left of the Place Saint-Michel, the 
gateway through which one passes on the way to the Latin 
Quarter, the Luxembourg, or the Pantheon. Fanfer- 
lot, the ''Squirrel," finding the problem beyond his 
strength, appealed to M. Lecoq, seeking that domi- 
nating personage in his home in the Rue Montmartre, 
which is less definite than usual, for the reason that the 
street in question is a long one, extending from the 
great boulevard all the way to the Halles Centrales. 
Lecoq, under his assumed name of M. Verduret, con- 
ferred with Prosper, after the latter's release from 
prison, at "La Bonne Foi," a small establishment, half 
cafe and half shop, in the Rue Saint-Honore, near the 
Palais Royal. The fancy dress ball, which Lecoq turned 
to such use, was held in the house of the bankers Jan- 
didier, in the Rue Saint-Lazare. The ensuing attempt 
on Lecoq's life took place in the near-by Rue du Fau- 
bourg Montmartre, a street the detective had naturally 
to use on his way home. For that home the admirer 
of the ingenious in the narrative of detection may with- 



SINISTER STREETS 91 

out shame feel an interest akin to that stirred by the 
sight of the windows in Upper Baker Street, London, 
behind which Mr. Sherlock Holmes smoked countless 
pipefuls of shag tobacco, and dogmatically imparted 
his theories to the obtuse Watson. 




OLD MONT SAINTE-GENEVlfevE 

VII. ABOUT PARIS WITH ALPHONSE DAUDET 

The Rue Mouffetard — Daudet^s First Impressions of Paris — 
In the Latin Quarter and the Marais — Scenes of " Sapho" — 
" Les Rois en Exil" — The Genesis of the Story — The Rue 
Monsieur le Prince — In the Paris Ghetto — Originals of the 
Daudet Characters. 



IN THAT remote section of Paris that lies beyond 
the Pantheon and at the foot of the Mont Sainte- 
Genevieve there is a street known as the Rue 
Mouffetard. It is, and always has been, a wretched 
thoroughfare, poorly paved with irregular cobble stones, 
and lined by squalid tenements. The centre of an 
Italian colony composed mostly of ragpickers, the 

92 



ABOUT PARIS WITH DAUDET 93 

gray monotony of its winding length is relieved by a 
touch of colour suggestive of the climbing slums of 
Naples. In that street was one of the first Paris homes 
that Alphonse Daudet shared with his brother. The 
two migrated there from the little room on the fifth 
floor of the Hotel du Senat in the Rue de Tournon in 
which Alphonse first slept in the city with which his 
subsequent Ufe and work were so closely associated. He 
was sixteen when he made that long journey from the 
heart of Languedoc, where he had been an usher in a 
school, to devote himself to literature. The wretched 
little valise which he had brought with him was pushed 
across the city to the Latin Quarter on a hand-cart. 
Breakfast at a creamery in the Rue Corneille, and then 
the visit to the Hotel du Senat. "Almost a garret," 
Daudet recorded in the first chapter of *'Trente Ans 
de Paris," "but in my eyes a superb apartment. A 
Parisian garret! The mere sight of the words Hotel du 
Senat standing forth in great letters on the sign flattered 
my self-esteem and dazzled me. Opposite the hotel, 
on the other side of the way, there was a house dating 
from the last century, with a pediment and two couchant 
figures, which always looked as if they proposed to fall 
from the top of the wall into the street. ^That's where 
Ricord lives,' said my brother, 'the famous Ricord, the 
Emperor's physician'." But his brother was rich, 
being paid the huge sum of seventy-five francs a month 
as secretary to an old gentleman who was dictating his 
memoirs. That seventy-five francs a month enabled 
the young southerners to dwell in the Hotel du Senat. 
But the old gentleman died, or his memoirs were fin- 



94 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

ished, or something happened to disturb the princely 
income, and the brothers were forced to take up their 
quarters in the Rue MoufFetard. A visit to that street 
will give a better insight into the work of the creator of 
"Sapho," "Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine," "Les Rois 
en Exil," "Jack," and *'Le Nabab." 

In the course of his years in Paris Daudet had almost 
as many residences as there are Parisian settings for his 
stories. He Hved in the Latin Quarter, where he found 
the Numa Roumestans and the Elysee Merauts of his 
youth. He lived in the Quartier de I'Europe, that sec- 
tion of the city in the neighbourhood of the Gare Saint- 
Lazare associated with so many of the urban scenes 
of "Sapho." "Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine" was 
written in one of the oldest houses in the Marais, and he 
worked in the inspiring atmosphere of his subject, in 
the environment in which his characters were moving. 
At stated hours the going to and fro from the workshops, 
the ringing of the factory bells, passed across his pages. 
He was invaded by the local colour. The whole quarter 
helped him, carried him along, worked for him. The 
Sunday evenings that he spent for years in the house of 
Gustave Flaubert in the Rue Murillo almost constituted 
a residence in the quarter of the Pare Monceau. At 
the time of his death his home was in a street in the 
aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain. Thence, twenty 
years ago, his body was borne to its resting place in the 
Cemetery of the Pere Lachaise. The present writer 
chanced to witness the passing of that cortege from the 
sidewalk of the Boulevard Saint-Germain. It was at the 
time when the excitement over the Dreyfus case was at 



PARIS WITH ALPHONSE DAUDET 95 

its height, and France was divided into two camps, the 
camp of those who voted coupable, and the camp of 
those who voted innocent. The unpopular Zola was 
one of the pall-bearers, and standing near the writer 
was a violent anti-Dreyfussard, who greeted the author 
of the Rougon-Macquart with the cry: "Respect for 
the memory of Alphonse Daudet! Conspuez Zola!'* 

If the visitor chances to be an arrival in Paris by the 
Chemin de Per de I'Ouest, that is if his is a train from 
Havre where he has descended after a transatlantic 
journey from New York or the Channel crossing from 
Southampton, he has but to leave the Gare Saint-Lazare 
to find himself in the heart of the Paris of "Sapho." 
In an apartment in the Rue d'Amsterdam, facing the 
station, Fanny Legrand and Jean Gaussin went to 
housekeeping next to the Hettemas. When the nights 
were stormy they could hear the patter of the rain on 
the zinc roof of the gare. The period of the story was 
about 1873, yet in forty-five years the street has changed 
hardly at all. To this day, a few doors north of the 
apartment is the English tavern where Jean, in his 
anguish, waited until far into the night, after the revela- 
tion of Fanny's past heard from Caoudal and Dechelette 
in front of the cafe in the Rue Royale. Following the 
footsteps of Jean in the brief journey between cafe and 
tavern, a slight detour will find the little Rue de I'Ar- 
cade, where Fanny lived in luxurious surroundings 
before her deepening attachment to Jean prompted her 
carelessly to throw ease aside. Facing the station on 
the west as the Rue d'Amsterdam faces it on the east, 
is the Rue de Rome. It was there, in the great house 



96 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

that Dechelette threw open to artistic Paris in the brief 
periods of rest from engineering tasks in remote lands, 
the story began. ^' Jean tout court?** persisted the 
woman in the Egyptian costume to the shy answer of 
the sunny-haired young Provencal, and there ensued 
the adventure that took them across half Paris to that 
climb of the staircase that was the epitome of their 
lives together. 

Also quite easy of identification is that hotel where 
Jean Gaussin was first installed when he came to Paris 
to fit himself for the consular career, and up the five 
flights of stairs of which he carried the newly made 
acquaintance in the "gray sadness of the morning." It 
is in the Rue Jacob, to the west of the Latin Quarter, 
on the south bank of the river, between the Ecole des 
Beaux Arts and the church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. 
To reach the street is a mere matter of crossing the 
Seine by the Pont du Carrousel, following the Rue des 
Saints-Peres past the Ecole des Beaux Arts, and then 
turning to the left. The Rue Jacob abuts at its eastern 
end on the Rue de Seine. The hotel, in the middle of 
the block, has had as subsequent guests a number of 
Americans, visiting Paris for more or less prolonged 
periods, and probably more than one New England 
conscience has slept undisturbed in the chamber where 
began the tempestuous loves of Sapho and Jean. 

To the scenic making of "Les Rois en Exil" went 
the Rue de Rivoli, the Rue Royale, bits of the Latin 
Quarter, the Quai d'Orsay, and the Ghetto in the Ma- 
rais. The book was born in a vision of the Place du 
Carrousel. One evening in October Daudet was stand' 



PARIS WITH ALPHONSE DAUDET 97 

ing looking at the tragic rent in the Parisian sky caused 
by the fall of the Tuileries. Dethroned princes exiling 
themselves in Paris after their downfall, taking up their 
quarters on the Rue de Rivoli, and when they woke in 
the morning and raised the shades at their windows, 
discovering these ruins. From that seed thought Dau- 
det builded the splendid edifice. It is the note with 
which the book begins; it is the note with which the 
book ends. The heroic Queen Frederica, stricken in 
her aspirations and in the terrible accident which has 
befallen her son, recognizes the analogy between those 
ruins and the fortunes of kings who have outlived their 
day. When the Tuileries, their ashes gilded by a ray 
of the departing sunlight, rise before her to recall the 
past, she looks at them without emotion, without mem- 
ory, as though she looked upon some ancient monument 
of Egypt or Assyria, the witness of manners, and of 
morals, and of peoples vanished, something once great, 
now gone forever. 

But best of all in "Les Rois en Exil" is the descrip- 
tion of the Rue Monsieur le Prince in the Latin Quarter 
where the monks of the Order of Saint-Francis, seeking a 
tutor for the little heir to the throne of Illyria, go to 
find Elysee Meraut, Dickens never drew the picture 
of a street with more loving care. "Amid all the trans- 
formations of the Quarter, and those great gaps through 
which are lost in the dust of demolition the originality, 
and the very memories of old Paris, the Rue Monsieur 
le Prince still keeps its physiognomy as a student's 
street," wrote Daudet. When the present writer last 
turned into it from the Boulevard Saint-Michel near the 



98 riii-: PARIS OF riiK novI':ms'i\s 

Luxcmboury; CardenvS in 1917, and followed its lcnj:;th 
down to tho point where it Hows into the square before 
the Houle\ aid Saini-Cu rinain, it was stdl as nuieh of a 
student street of the old type as was possible in a city 
nearint; the end of the thiid year of the world war. 
There were the book-stalls, the creameries, and the 
old-elothes dealers as in Meraut's time. But gone were 
tile students of Gavarni's pencil, witii long hair flying 
from wt)olen caps, while their successors, the "future 
lawyers, buttoned from head to foot in their ulsters, 
brushed ami gK)\ed, with enormous morocco cases 
under their anus, and the cold, cunning air of the busi- 
ness agent already upon them; or the future doctors, a 
little freer in behaviour," were somewhere in tiie Hghting 
line along the western front. 

Also exceedingly viyid are the glimpses of the Ruo 
Kginhard, in the Marais, where Fere Leemans retained 
his musty old place of connoisseurs, after opening his 
splendid antiquarian shop in the Rue de la Paix, and 
where the sinister Sephora lirst made acquaintance 
with the wi^ld. The Rue Kglnliard is a little street, 
behind the l.ycee Ciiarlemagne, near where, on the 
journey between the l.ouvre and the Place de la Bastille, 
the Rue de Rlvoli beciMiies the Rue Saint-Antoine. It is 
best describeil in the wonls of Wattelet. painter of the 
Grand Club, wiio drew the picture for King Christian. 
"Rue Eglnhard ... in the Marais ... a 
dirty little damp alley, between the Passage Charle- 
magne and the Church of St. Paul, regular Jewry . . . 
that tangle of streets . . . an amazing Paris . . . 
such houses, such heads, .1 yentable gabble ot Hebrew 



PARIS WITH ALIMIONSK DAUDET 99 

and Alsatian; shops, lairs of old-clothes dealers, piled 
that hij^h with laf^s before every door, old women sort- 
ing them with their hooked noses, or stripping off the 
covers of the old umbrellas; and the dogs! the vermin! 
the smells! a regular Ghetto of the Middle Ages, swarm- 
ing in houses of that period, iron balconies, tall windows 
cut into lofts." Agam, when Sephora went there for 
the purpose of submitting to her father the plans for 
the great stroke by which the two hundred million 
francs of the Republic of Illyria were to be diverted 
into her own lap, she found her youth coming back to 
her in that curious old quarter where each street bore 
on its corner the names of its noted merchants, names 
that had not changed for years. In passing through 
the black archway which serves as an entrance to the 
Rue Eginhard from the Rue Saint-Paul, "she encoun- 
tered the long robe of a rabbi on his way to the neighbour- 
ing synagogue; two steps farther on was a rat-catcher 
with his pole and his plank, to which hung the hairy 
corpses, a type of old Paris no longer to be seen except 
in this tangle of mouldy buildings, where all the rats 
in the city have their headquarters; and, at the door of 
two or three shops, comprising the whole street, and 
where the shutters were just being taken down, she saw 
the same old garments hanging in a mass, and heard the 
same Hebraic and Teutonic gabble, so that when, hav- 
ing crossed the low porch of the paternal domicile, 
the little courtyard, and the four steps leadmg up 
to the shop, she pulled the string of the cracked bell, 
it seemed to her that she had fifteen years less upon her 
shoulders." 



loo THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Of all Daudet's books, "Les Rols en Exil" was the 
one with which he had the most difficulty, the one 
which, in the stage of title and vague outhne, he carried 
longest in his head. In his search for models and for 
accurate information he was obliged to press into ser- 
vice all his acquaintances from the top to the bottom 
of the social ladder. He interviewed the upholsterers 
who furnished the mansions of exiled kings, and the 
great noblemen who visited these homes socially and 
diplomatically. He pored over the records of the 
police-court and the bills of tradesmen, going in this 
way to the bottom of those royal existences, discovering 
instances of proud destitution, of heroic devotion side 
by side with manias, infirmities, tarnished honour, and 
seared consciences. It was for a long time believed 
that the King and Queen of Holland were the originals 
of Christian and Frederica of Illyria. As a matter 
of fact, they were made from odds and ends. Elysee 
Meraut, however, was drawn from the life — one Constant 
Therion, whom Daudet used to meet from time to time 
in the early days — a young man who was forever coming 
out of book-stalls, or burj^ing his nose in old volumes 
in front of the shops that surround the Odeon; "a long, 
dishevelled devil, with a peculiar trick, constantly 
repeated, like the spasms of the St. Vitus's dance, of ad- 
justing his spectacles on a flat, open sensual nose in- 
stinct with love of life." To the figure of this strange 
Bohemian, who used to stalk about the Quartier, shout- 
ing his monarchical opinions, Daudet brought the im- 
pression of his own southern childhood. *'It occurred 
to me to make him a countryman of mine own, from 



PARIS WITH ALPHONSE DAUDET loi 

Nimes, from that hard-working bourgade from which 
all my father's workmen came: to place in his bedroom 
that red seal, 'Fides, Spes,* which I had seen in the 
house of my own parents where we used to sing 'Five 
Henri F'l" Meraut having been invented, Daudet 
began to study out the problem of how he could be in- 
troduced into the royal household. The idea came of 
making him the tutor of a prince; hence, Zara. And 
while at work on this part of the book an accident took 
place in the family of a friend, a child struck in the 
eye by a bullet from a parlour rifle suggested the idea 
of the poor kingmaker destroying his own work. 

Looking down on the broad Avenue des Champs- 
Elysees, on the northern side, near the Rond-Point 
de I'Etoile, there is a balcony before which the present 
writer, whenever he happens to be in that section of 
Paris, never fails to stop. It was on that balcony, in 
one of the most memorable of all Alphonse Daudet 's 
delightful short tales, "Le Siege de Berlin," a story 
which, incidentally, was later reflected in certain 
episodes in Miss Ellen Glasgow's American novel, 
"The Descendant," that Colonel Jouve, old cuirassier 
or the First Empire, fell dead after his terrible cry "To 
arms! To arms! The Prussians!" The veteran of 
the old wars, come to Paris at the outbreak of the con- 
flict of 1870, for the purpose of witnessing the return 
of the victorious French troops, is gravelyjStrlcken at the 
first bulletin of disaster. To save him those about him 
invent an imaginary campaign, which carries the Tri- 
color slowly but steadily toward Berlin. The sound of 
the guns when Paris is invested is interpreted as salutes 



102 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

fired at the Invalides in celebration of new victories 
on German soil. Complacently consuming the delica- 
cies before him he regales with stories of eating horse 
meat during the terrible retreat from Moscow the de- 
voted grand-daughter who for weeks has eaten nothing 
else. Then his ears catch the words "They enter to- 
morrow," and thinking that it means the return of the 
French, he steals out on the balcony, clad in all the 
antiquated but glorious toggery of an old cuirassier of 
Milhaud, to see the helmets of the advancing Uhlans, 
and to hear the strains of the triumphant march of 
Schubert. How pregnant with new meaning that 
little tale is to-day! In a building not one hundred 
yards from the structure to which belongs the balcony 
where Colonel Jouve died, the writer, in April, 1917, had 
the good fortune to witness, as a guest, the celebration 
of his country's entry into the conflict the issue of which 
has restored to the France of the old cuirassier the well- 
beloved Alsace and Lorraine. 

In the Champs-Elysees quarter Sephora Leemans 
kept a pension before she became the legitimate spouse 
of Tom Levis, more English than any Englishman 
possibly could be for the reason that he had been born 
Narcisse Poitou, the son of an upholsterer in the Rue 
de rOrillon; and Fanny Legrand served as manager 
and accountant for a like establishment belonging to 
the loathsome Rosario, for a period from Jean Gaussin's 
departure for the home of his childhood to the time 
when they resumed their life a deux in the Httle cottage 
in Chaville. Also in the neighbourhood was the Gym- 
nase Moronval, where Jack de Barancy (Jack) passed 



PARIS WITH ALPHONSE DAUDET 103 

so many miserable months of his childhood, and which 
witnessed the tragedy of the little King of Dahomey. 
The Gymnase Moronval, which may be called the 
Dotheboys Hall of French fiction, and which perhaps 
owed as much to the Wackford Squeers school of 
"Nicholas Nickleby" as the Httle Desiree of "Fromont 
et Risler" owed to the doll's dressmaker of "Our 
Mutual Friend," was definitely placed at 25 Avenue 
Montaigne. There was the flavour of Dickens in the 
Daudet denunciation: "If the Gymnase Moronval 
still exists, as I like to believe, I desire to call the at- 
tention of the health commission to the dormitory of 
that respectable factory as the craziest, unhealthiest, 
dampest hole in which children have ever been forced 
to sleep. Imagine a long ground-floor building, win- 
dowless, lighted only from above by a glass in the roof, 
and scented with an indelible odour of collodion and 
ether, for in other days it had been used for the prepara- 
tion of the photographer's materials. The affair was 
situated at the rear end of one of those Parisian gardens 
surrounded by great gloomy walls overgrown with ivy, 
covering with mold everything over which it creeps. 
The dormitory was at the rear of a stately hotel, close 
to a stable, filled all day with the noise of horses' hoofs, 
and the sound of a pump always spouting, which com- 
pleted the water-soaked appearance of this rheumatic 
hole, its walls bordered half way up by a sinister band 
of green Hke the water line of a ship." Whatever may 
have been its state when Daudet wrote that, to-day 
it is as irrevocably dead as the original of Moronval 
the mulatto, who had a share in the management of 



I04 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

the Revue Coloniale^ and was in the Chamber of Depu- 
ties sometime after 1870. 

As painstaking as Dickens in the work of finding 
the street and the very house for his characters, in the 
matter of his living models Daudet went to an extreme 
to which Dickens had never dared to go. His novels 
were, in the fullest sense of the term, romans a clef. 
The accusation of ingratitude caused him in later life 
to attempt to obscure the association of the Due de 
Mora, of "Le Nabab," with the Due de Mornay, the 
half brother of the Third Napoleon, and Daudet's 
patron when the novelist was young. But his was, at 
best, a lame evasion. All the characters of "Fromont 
Jeune et Risler Aine" had originals. Planus the 
cashier was really named Scherer. "I knew him,'* 
Daudet has written, **in a banking house in the Rue 
de Londres where he would stand in front of his well- 
filled safe, shaking his head and murmuring in his 
German accent with tragi-comic distress *Ja! ja! 
money, much money; put I haf no gonfidence.'" There 
was also an original of Sidonie and her parents' home. 
The true Sidonie, however, was not as black as the 
heroine of the book. Risler was a memory of Daudet's 
childhood, an Alsatian factory draughtsman, who 
worked for the author's father. Daudet transformed 
him from an Alsatian into a Swiss in order not to in- 
troduce into the book a sentimental patriotism. The 
immortal Delobelle was the summing up of all that 
Daudet knew about actors, their manias, the difficulty 
they find in recovering their footing in life when they 
go off the stage, in maintaining an individuality in so 



PARIS WITH ALPHONSE DAUDET 105 

many varying masks. Once, at the time of the Franco- 
Prussian War, the novehst attended the funeral of a 
great actor's daughter. There he found all the details 
that he introduced later at the death of little Desiree — 
"the typical entrees of the guests, their pump-like action 
in shaking hands, varied according to the practices of 
their respective roles, the tear caught in the corner of 
the eye and looked at on the end of the glove." In 
the original scheme of the book Desiree was to have 
been a doll's dressmaker, a trade characteristic of the 
noisy, humming Marais. But someone pointed out 
that that would be a little too close to the character 
in "Our Mutual Friend," so Daudet searched many 
dark houses, climbed many cold stairways with a rail 
of rope, until, one day, in the Rue du Temple, on a 
leather sign in faded gold letters, he read the words: 
"birds and insects for ornament."] 
Despite all that Daudet had to say to the contrary, 
tout Paris was very nearly right, when, at the time of 
the appearance of "Numa Roumestan," it insisted 
that the character of the hero had been, in a measure, 
drawn from Gambetta. But also scraps and fragments 
of other men went to the making of Numa. Others 
besides Gambetta were recognized or recognized them- 
selves in the character. Numa Baragnon, a Southerner 
and an ex-minister, misled by the similarity of Christian 
names, was one of the first to protest. The tambour- 
inaire, Valmajour, was suggested by a musician named 
Buisson, who came to Paris with a letter to Daudet 
from Frederic Mistral. It was from Buisson's lips 
that the novelist heard the little tale beginning: "It 



io6 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

came to me at night.'* The house in Nimes in which 
Numa was born was one in which Daudet Hved as a 
child; the Brothers' school of the book was one of his 
earliest memories. Among the men and women who 
figure in "Sapho," Caoudal bears more than a resem- 
blance to the great Gerome. 



VIII. BOHEMIAN TRAILS 

The Migration of Bohemia — "La Vie de BohemCf" and 
"Trilby" — Henry Murger and His Contemporaries — Youth 
and Age — A Bohemian s Expense Book of the 'Forties — 
" Trilby" — The Studio in the Place Saint-Anatole des Arts — Du 
Maurier and Henry James — Du Maurier in Paris and Ant- 
zuerp — Trails of the " Micsketeers of the Brush" — Originals 
of the Characters. 

ON THE subject of Bohemian Paris, books are 
likely to be written till the end of time. It 
does not matter greatly that the Bohemianism 
that used to be associated with the Latin Quarter of the 
rive gauche has of recent years found its way up the 
slope that leads to the sacred summit of Montmartre; 
that the "Louise" of the later opera has looked down 
on the lights of Paris from the heights to the north, 
whereas the "Mimis" and "Musettes" of "La Boheme" 
fluttered and frivolled their light lives in streets nearer 
the murky waters of the Seine. For Bohemia is less a 
region of definite situation and boundaries than a state 
of mind, a memory of youth and ofthe glamour of youth. 
The extent of Villon's Bohemianism is not to be meas- 
ured by the particular tripot in which he thieved and 
boozed; nor that of Verlaine by the location of the cafe 
from which he surveyed the passing sidewalk world 
through absinthe-glazed eyes. 

107 ' 



io8 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

To American readers there are two works of fiction 
dealing with Bohemia that long have stood out above 
all others. They are the "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" 
of Henry Murger, and the "Trilby" of George Du 
Maurier; and with those books and their stories, and 
the stories of the men who wrote them, and the Paris 
that is reflected in their pages, this chapter has to do. 
Though written many years apart — the "Scenes de la 
Vie de Boheme" was pubHshed in 1848 and "Trilby" 
in 1894 — there is not a great difference in the setting 
of the scene of the two tales, for it was the Paris of the 
'forties that Murger gilded with his fancy, while Du 
Maurier, taking to novel spinning when almost sixty, 
drew upon the Paris that he had known in his student 
youth, the Second-Empire Paris of the late 'fifties. 
In a word, the "Vie de Boheme" is a tale of '48; 
"Trilby" a tale of '58. First, let us take up the 
earlier, and, from the American point of view, less 
widely read book. 

Henry Murger was born in February, 1822 — according 
to some, in Paris; according to others, in Savoy. 
Among the French men of letters regarded as his con- 
temporaries he was the youngest; twenty-three years 
younger than Balzac; twenty years younger than Victor 
Hugo; twenty years younger than Dumas pere; eighteen 
years younger than Sainte-Beuve; twelve years younger 
than Gautier and Alfred de Musset; and almost the 
same age as Emile Augier and the younger Dumas, 
whom we are inclined to regard as belonging to a later 
literary generation. Among these men the creator 
of the "Comedie Humaine" seems to have had the 



BOHEMIAN TRAILS 109 

greatest influence on Murger's work. In the second 
part of "Illusions Perdues" Balzac told of a group of 
young literary men and painters, who, disdaining to 
resort to the customary self-exploitation, plodded on to 
success, silently and indefatigably. In "Les Buveurs 
d'Eau," after the "Vie de Boheme" his best book, 
Murger drew the reverse of the picture, frankly ac- 
knowledging the inspiration. Incidentally, it was in 
the Rue du Doyenne, the narrow ravine between the 
Louvre and the Place du Carrousel, which Balzac de- 
scribed so powerfully in "Cousine Bette," that Murger 
knew the cenacle that he introduced in his most famous 
work. 

Murger's origin was of the humblest. His father, 
a concierge and tailor, wished to bring up his son to hard 
manual labour. But the mother intervened, with the 
result that the boy had a few years* schooling, after 
which he was sent into a lawyer's office. After a few 
months at this work, which he detested, he became 
the secretary of Count Tolstoy, a Russian nobleman, 
representing his country officially. Forty francs a 
month was the pay, and Murger held the position long 
after it had become a sinecure, and he entered his em- 
ployer's house only to draw the salary. He liked that 
well enough, but a day came when the Russian was 
inconsiderate enough to call for his services. So Mur- 
ger lost his forty francs a month and became a thorough- 
going literary Bohemian. 

There are few finer "special articles" in any language 
than the preface that Murger wrote for the "Scenes 
de la Vie de Boheme." In it he traced the history 



no THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

of Bohemianism from the times of the Grecian vaga- 
bonds who went about singing of the loves of Helen 
and the fall of Troy, through the ages of the Trouba- 
dours, the century of the Italian Renaissance, the days 
of Fran9ois Villon, and down to the seventeenth, the 
eighteenth, and the early half of the nineteenth century. 
Bohemia he defined as "the stage of art life, the ante- 
room of the Academy, the Hospital, or the Morgue.'* 
Of Bohemians and their ways he wrote: 

To achieve their aims, all roads are good, since they know how to 
avail themselves of the chances of the way. Neither rain nor dust, 
neither shadow nor sunshine — nothing stops these bold adventurers 
whose very vices are lined with virtues. Their wits are spurred by 
their ambition, which sounds the charge and urges them to the 
assault of the Future. With them existence itself is a work of 
genius; a daily problem to be solved by the most daring mathe- 
matics. These men could borrow money from Harpagon, and find 
truffles in the skull of Medusa. At need they know how to practise 
the abstinence of an anchorite, but let fortune smile upon them for a 
minute and they cannot find windows enough out of which to throw 
their money. Then with the last crown gone, they begin again to 
dine at the table d'hote of chance, where their places are always set, 
spending their days in the pursuit of that elusive animal, the five- 
franc piece. 

When Murger died, at the age of thirty-nine, he was 
already an old man, bald, broken down, prematurely 
worn out by the hardship and dissipation of his youth. 
Perhaps the end was hurried by the very fear of that 
old age which he found so ridiculous and pilloried so 
savagely in his books. Whenever a man who has 
passed the twenties appears in his pages he is a con- 
cierge, or a grocer, or a bootmaker, or a provincial, or 



BOHEMIAN TRAILS in 

worse still, a proprietor after the rent — always a 
creditor of some kind and usually a hypocrite to boot, 
whose mission is to serve as a foil and butt of glowing, 
ardent youth. Better to be young and hungry in a 
garret than in a palace to feel one's self to be slipping 
down the hill. Recognition and comparative comfort 
were the portion of his own later life. But that could 
not shut out the thought, half melancholy and half 
hysterical, that the years were gliding swiftly by; 
that his hand was losing the strength to grasp the 
shadow of the Bohemia that was part memory and 
part imagination. 

Yet he worked to the end. His preference for poetry 
was so strong that he would seldom yield to necessity 
and write prose. He was always a slow and capricious 
worker. In the early days his pages were wrought in 
the quiet of the night, under the stimulation of cup 
after cup of coffee, usually in bed for the want of a fire. 
The "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme'* appeared first in 
the Corsaire, Murger receiving fifteen francs for each 
instalment; in all, twenty dollars, in round figures, was 
the price paid for a masterpiece which Jules Janin 
called "a first chapter in the code of youth." The life 
of the years preceding the publication, the life of which 
the book is the lyric expression, is best conveyed by the 
following paragraphs taken from a letter written to 
Murger by his fellow Bohemian, Champfleury: 

Our income was seventy francs a month. But we had confidence 
in the future. We rented a small apartment in the Rue Vaugirard, 
which cost us three hundred francs a year. You brought in six 
plates, a Shakespeare, the works of Victor Hugo, a bureau of in- 



112 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

calculable age, and a Phrygian cap. By a strange chance I was the 
owner of two mattresses, a bedstead, one hundred and eighty vol- 
umes, two small chairs, a table, and a human skull. We seldom went 
out, we smoked continually and worked a good deal. 

The days of our greatest misery came. We decided that as soon 
as our income was drawn we would keep an account of expenditures. 
We were wonderfully honest at the beginning of every month. Under 
the date of November ist, I read: "Paid to Mme. Bastien for to- 
bacco, two francs." We also paid our grocer, our coal man, and the 
restaurant. The first day of the month was evidently a revel. I 
find: "Spent at the cafe five sous." On the same day you bought 
fifteen sous' worth of pipes. On November 2nd you pay an im- 
portant sum, five francs, to the washerwoman. On November 3rd 
you decide that as long as the seventy francs last we are to do our 
own cooking. In consequence you buy a soup pot, fifteen sous, 
some vegetables and some laurel leaves. In your capacity of poet 
you were over partial to laurel, our soup was constantly afflicted 
with it. We also laid in potatoes, sugar, tobacco, and coffee. 

Profanity and gnashing of teeth marked the inscribing in our 
book of the expenses of November 4th. On the next day we lent 
an enormous sum, thirty-five sous, to G — , who, it appears, has de- 
cided upon us as his regular bankers, — the house of Murger and 
Company. Until November 8th we made the addition at the foot 
of the ledger. By that time forty francs sixty-one centimes had 
disappeared On the i6th we were compelled to call on M. Credit. 
M. Credit went to the grocer's, the tobacconist's, the coal man's. 
He was not very badly received; assuming your form, he was very 
successful with the grocer's daughter. Did M. Credit die on the 
17th? I find noted: "From Prince Albert three francs." On 
November 19th we sold some books. 

The expense book of which Champfleury wrote dealt 
with the year 1843. It apparently indicated a period 
of comparative affluence. The following year they were 
forced to return to their old attic in the Rue du Doy- 
enne, and the society of Schaunard, Colline, Marcel, 



BOHEMIAN TRAILS 113 

and Barbemuche, all of whom have been identified. 
The Rodolphe of the tale was Murger himself. The 
band made its headquarters at the Cafe Momus, de- 
scribed at length in the "Vie de Boheme," and by their 
noise and eccentricity of attire and deportment speed- 
ily drove away the proprietor's respectable clients. 
Of the Cafe Momus seemingly no trace now exists. 
It once had actual existence in a side street near the 
church of Saint-Germain TAuxerrois, but the structure 
was long ago swept away in the vast scheme of city 
improvement. To indicate the Paris of the "Scenes 
de la Vie de Boheme" it is not necessary to go beyond 
the opening pages of the story, which treat of the es- 
tablishment of the famous society. Schaunard, the 
"Great Musician," is evicted on the morning of April 
8th for non-payment of his rent. Marcel, the "Great 
Painter," moves into the vacated apartment. Schau- 
nard spends the day wandering about Paris. In the 
course of his adventures he forms the acquaintance of 
Rodolphe, the "Great Poet," and CoHine, the "Great 
Philosopher." The three spend the evening in a drink- 
ing bout. When they leave the cafe at midnight a 
thunderstorm comes up. Colline and Rodolphe live 
at the other end of Paris. Schaunard, from whose 
fuddled mind all memory of the events of the morning 
has passed, invites them to share his apartment. 

Shut up in Paris, living from hand to mouth, dwelling 
as did his Rodolphe, on the sixth floor, "because there 
was no seventh," Murger drew his inspiration from the 
flowers growing in pots along the window sill over the 



114 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

way. He would have liked to have roamed through 
great forests, to have listened to the sobbing of wood- 
land winds, to the roar of the sea of which he had read. 
Denied this, he turned to the ticketed trees in the Tuil- 
eries Gardens; the plash of the Luxembourg fountains. 
For him, as for Balzac, the river Seine was full of mys- 
tery. He would have liked to have followed its winding 
length to the beyond of his imagination. He felt 
strongly the magic of names. "Bagdad," "Barbary," 
suggested magnificent daydreams. But at hand was 
the wretched grenier^ and the four bare walls that 
limited his life, and the fist knocking peremptorily at 
the door was probably that of the importunate corner 
grocer. 

As has been told, the "Scenes de la Vie de Boheme'* 
appeared in 1848. What worlds of fancy that splendid 
decade of 1 840-50 opened up! Hugo gave us "Notre 
Dame"; Dumas, "The Count of Monte Cristo," and 
the series dealing with the immortal Musketeers; Eu- 
gene Sue, "Les Mysteres de Paris," and "Le Juif 
Errant"; Balzac, the books of the "Comedie Humaine" 
known as the "Parens Pauvres.'* To the decade Eng- 
lish fiction owes "Vanity Fair"' and "Pendennis"; 
"David Copperfield," "Dombey and Son," Martin 
Chuzzlewit," and "Barnaby Rudge"; "The Caxtons," 
"Night and Morning," "Zanoni," "Harold," and "The 
Last of the Barons"; the American Cooper wrought 
"The Pathfinder" and "The Deerslayer" of the Lea- 
ther Stocking Tales. What giants those men were! 
What giant cudgels they wielded! What Gargantuan 
banquets they set before their readers! 



BOHEMIAN TRAILS 115 

There are many roads leading to the Latin Quarter 
of Paris. But the natural gateway is the Place Saint- 
Michel, which is reached from the right bank by cross- 
ing first the Pont au Change, then the Cite, by way of 
the broad Boulevard du Palais, and then the Pont Saint- 
Michel. Just beyond the Place Saint-Michel, veering 
to the right, there is a little open place. It was there, 
as told in George du Manner's "Trilby," that "Taffy," 
''the Laird," and "Little Billee" had their studio, to 
which Trilby went with her cry of "Milk below!", and 
Svengali made beautiful music and played his weird, 
hypnotic tricks. For the Place Saint-Anatole des Arts of 
the story was in reality the Place Saint-Andre des Arts. 
No American in Paris who recalls the charm of Mr. du 
Manner's tale, which, twenty-five years ago, thrilled 
in a manner as perhaps no other novel has ever thrilled, 
can afford not to make the brief pilgrimage that is a 
matter of so few steps, and is so rich in awakened memo- 
ries. For, in addition to the story itself, what better 
guides to the history and the romance of the quarter 
could one ask than the ghosts of the "Three Musketeers 
of the Brush"? The Place Saint-Andre des Arts has 
changed since Second Empire days; the old houses, and 
the cracked, dingy, discoloured walls, with mysterious 
windows and rusty iron windows of great antiquity 
that set Little Billee dreaming dreams of mediaeval 
French love and wickedness, have long since vanished. 
But still, one hundred yards or so away, is the arm of 
the river, and yonder, as of old, are the towers of Notre 
Dame, and behind, the ominous Morgue. 

It is as interesting a setting of the scene of fiction as 



ii6 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

one readily recalls. Other ghosts of romance besides 
Little Billee mooning, and TaflPy performing feats of 
strength, and the Laird, reciting scraps of Thackeray's 
"Ballad of the Bouillabaisse," and painting Spanish 
toreadors, and Miss O'Ferrall in the gray overcoat of a 
French infantry soldier, and Svengali accompanying 
her as she attempts what she conceives to be the tune 
of "Ben Bolt," people the structure that the Pilgrim 
of to-day happens to select as having housed the old 
studio. There is the pathetic Gecko; and Durien sing- 
ing Chagrin d'amour, and Plaisir d*amour; and the 
tipsy Zou Zou and Dodor at cock-fighting; and Car- 
negie, Vincent, Lorimer, and Antony, the Swiss, who, 
in the first version, was Joe Sibley, to the furious in- 
dignation of the American painter Whistler, and Mrs. 
Bagot, and the Reverend Mr. Bagot (a most unpleasant 
person), who crossed the Channel to save Little Billee 
from the happiness that a suitable mesalliance would 
have brought him. It cannot be that that tale which 
once so stirred all hearts, especially the hearts of those 
just coming up to twenty years, is a forgotten tale; that 
the new generation knows it not ! In the hey-day of its 
fame, pedantic and dull-witted smugness fleered at it 
as "as great a violation of reality and verisimilitude 
as Murger's *Vie de Boheme'." But into it, Du Mau- 
rier, looking back from the ripeness of years to his rapin 
days, breathed all the spirit of the lines: "To drain all 
life's quintessence in an hour, give me the days when 
I was twenty-one!" 

One day George du Maurier, already famous as the 
Punch draughtsman, was walking in the High Street 



BOHEMIAN TRAILS 117 

of Bayswater in company with Henry James, In the 
course of the talk James spoke of the difficulty he had 
in finding plots for his stories. "Plots!" exclaimed Du 
Maurier, "I am full of plots." He went on to outline 
the story of "Trilby." "But you ought to write that 
story," said James. "I can't write. I have never writ- 
ten, "was the answer. "If you like the plot so much 
you may have it." But James would not take it, saying 
that it was too valuable a present, and that Du Maurier 
must write the story himself. On reaching home that 
night Du Maurier set to work. But it was not on 
"Trilby." By the next morning he had written the 
first two numbers of "Peter Ibbetson." It seemed, he 
said, all to flow from his pen in a full stream. But he 
thought it must be poor stuff, and he determined to 
look for an omen to learn whether any success would 
attend the new departure. So he walked out into the 
garden, and the very first thing that he saw was a large 
wheel-barrow, and that comforted him and reassured 
him, for, it may be remembered, there is a wheel-barrow 
in the first chapter of the story. "Peter Ibbetson," by 
the way, was written first in English, then translated 
into French, and then back again into English. Just 
as America was later to set rolling the ball of "Trilby's " 
popularity, America was first to welcome Du Maurier 
in the role of novelist. He was dining with an American 
publisher who said: "I hear, Du Maurier, that you are 
writing stories. Won't you let me see something?" 
So "Peter [Ibbetson" was sent to America and was ac- 
cepted at once. 
The son of a French father born in London and an 



ii8 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

English mother, George Louis Pamella Busson Du Mau- 
rier was born in Paris on March 6, 1834. The elder Du 
Maurier, a scientific man, designed his son for a scien- 
tific career, and placed him as a pupil in the Birkbeck 
Chemical Laboratory of University College. But 
the boy had little liking for the work, and spent most 
of his time drawing caricatures. His ambition at the 
time was to go in for music and singing, a fact which 
has a direct bearing on the "Trilby" of so many years 
later. The family was all musical; a sister, who later 
married Clement Scott, was a gifted pianist, and the 
father possessed a voice of such rare beauty that had 
he taken up singing as a profession he would "undoubt- 
edly have been one of the greatest singers of his time. 
Perhaps it was his own^sound knowledge of the art — in 
his>youth he had studied at the Paris Conservatory — 
that led '^him to discourage all musical aspirations 
in his son. So denied a musical career, and feeling 
himself quite unfitted for science, the boy turned to 
art. 

In 1856, after the death of his father, George Du 
Maurier went to Paris and enrolled himself as a student 
in the Atelier Gleyre. The Atelier Gleyre was the Atelier 
Carrel of "Trilby." Those were the joyous Latin Quar- 
ter days, spent in the society of Poynter, Whistler, 
Armstrong, Lamont, and others. But they did not 
last long, for in 1857 the Du Maurier family went to 
Antwerp, and there George worked at the Antwerp 
Academy under Der Kayser and Van Lerius. It was 
on a day in Van Lerius's studio that the great tragedy 
of his life took place. He himself has described it: 



BOHEMIAN TRAILS 119 

I was drawing from a model, when suddenly the girl's head seemed 
to me to dwindle to the size of a walnut. I clapped my hand over 
my left eye. Had I been mistaken.'' I could see as well as ever. 
But when in its turn I covered my right eye I knew what had hap- 
pened. My left eye had failed me; it might be altogether lost. It 
was so sudden a blow that I was as thunderstruck. Seeing my dis- 
may Van Lerius came up and asked me what might be the matter; 
and when I told him he said that it was nothing, that he had had that 
himself, and so on. And a doctor whom I anxiously consulted that 
same day comforted me, and said that the accident was a passing one. 
However, my eye grew worse and worse, and the fear of total blind- 
ness beset me constantly. 

It was an event that poisoned all of Du Maurier's 
existence. In the spring of 1859 he heard of a great 
specialist who lived in Diisseldorf, and went to see him. 
The specialist examined Du Maurier's eyes, and said 
that while the left eye was certainly lost, there was no 
reason to fear losing the other. But to the end of his 
life Du Maurier was never able to shake off entirely the 
terrible apprehension. 

This is hardly the place to deal at any length with 
the long years of achievement between the rapi7i days 
in Paris and Antwerp, and the^time,in late'Hfe, when, with 
*'Peter Ibbetson," **Trilby," and "The Mardan," he 
found a new and surprisingly successful metier. Briefly: 
he went to England in i860, sharing his first London 
lodging with *' Jimmy" Whistler. His first Punch 
drawing represented Whistler and himself entering a 
photographer's studio. In time he took his seat at the 
"Punch Table" — the seat that had been John Leech's — 
and began the long labour of holding up the mirror to 
EngUsh society with such creations as Bunthorne, Sir 



I20 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Georgeous Midas, Postlewaite, and Mrs. Ponsonby- 
Tompkyns. He made many friends, and was soon 
rubbing elbows intimately with all that was best in 
London's art, music, and letters. But he came a little 
too late to know some of the great Victorians, never 
seeing Dickens save at John Leech's funeral, and meeting 
his great literary idol, Thackeray, upon whose style 
his own writing style was modelled, only once. 

The style, from hard reading of Thackeray. That 
is to be understood. But whence came the crafts- 
manship that enabled him, full armed, to enter the lists 
of authorship? That puzzled Du Maurier himself. 
He was talking of it one day to Anstey, expressing his 
amazement at the success of his books, in view of the 
fact that he had never written before. "Never writ- 
ten!" cried Anstey. "Why, my dear,Du Maurier, you 
have been writing all your life, and the best of writing 
practice at that. Those little dialogues of yours, which 
week after week you have been fitting to your drawings 
in Punchy have prepared you admirably. It was pre- 
cis writing, and gave you conciseness, and repartee, and 
appositeness, and the best qualities of the writer of 
fiction." Very likely Anstey was right, and that that 
was the secret. For Du Maurier was seven and fifty 
years of age before his first novel, "Peter Ibbetson," 
was given to the world. 

But to return to the Paris trail. The Place Saint-Ana- 
tole des Arts was the Place Saint-Andre des Arts, and the 
Atelier Carrel was the Atelier Gleyre. The home of 
Trilby herself was in the street that Du Maurier called 
the Rue du Puits d'Amour. Trilby indicated the 




"The Morgue, that gruesome building which the great etcher Meryon 
has managed to invest with some weird fascination akin to that it had for 
me in those days — and has now, as I see it with the charmed eyes ot 
Memory." — Du Maurier's "Peter Ibbetson." 



BOHEMIAN TRAILS 121 

exact address. " Treize his, Rue du Puits (T Amour, 
rez-de-chausseCy au fond de la cour a gauche, vis-d-vis le 
mont de piete. "The real name of the street was, and is, 
the Rue Git-le-Coeur. It is a short thoroughfare, run- 
ning from the Rue St. Andre des Arts to the Quai des 
Grands Augustins. Then there was allusion to the 
Rue Vieille des Mauvais] Ladres (the old street of the 
bad lepers) which in all likelihood was the Rue de la 
Vieille Boucherie of other days; and the Rue Tire-Liard, 
where Svengali lived; and the Rue des Pousse-Cailloux, 
to which Trilby moved after she left the Martins. 

But there is a Trilby trail that is easier for the casual 
visitor to follow; a trail that does not call for scrutiny 
of old maps and consultation of the BoUins of bygone 
years. If it was a fine Saturday the Laird and Little 
Billee would pick up Taffy, who lived in the Rue de 
Seine, and thence the three would make their way to 
the Cite for a look at the Morgue. Then they would 
turn westward along the quais of the left bank, stopping 
in the middle of the Pont des Arts to study the river 
and dream, and then proceed to the Louvre, the Rue de 
Rivoli, the Place de la Concorde, the Madeleine, and 
along the boulevards. Incidentally the Pilgrim is 
warned against using the book too literally as a guide. 
Even such seasoned Parisians as the "Musketeers of the 
Brush " would have been at their wits' ends in directing 
their footsteps to conform with the actual text. 

Despite the accident of residence in the Place Saint- 
Anatole des Arts, Little Billee's heart was not in the 
Latin Quarter, but in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, es- 
pecially the Rue de Lille, where he would gaze at the 



122 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

"hotels" of the old French noblesse^ and forget himself 
in dreams of past and forgotten French chivalry. And 
his favourite among all the splendid structures of that 
easily found street was the "Hotel de la Rochemartel." 
It was before the gateway that Little Billee, "no snob, 
but a respectably brought up young Briton of the higher 
middle classes" learned, to his consternation, that the 
real name of the disreputable Zouave Zou-Zou, of whose 
company he had been so ashamed, was "Gontran-Xav- 
ier-Fran9ois-Marie-Joseph d'Amaury-Brissac de Ron- 
cesvaulx de la Rochemartel-Boissegur." The present 
entrance of the Grand Hotel is on the Rue Scribe. But 
until eight or nine years ago the entrance was through 
an archway at No. 12 Boulevard des Capucines. In 
place of the present tea-room there was a courtyard 
with a circular driveway and a fountain in the middle. 
It was in this courtyard that Svengali spat in Little 
Billee's face and had his own nose violently tweaked 
by the herculean Taffy, 

For the trail of "Trilby," Du Maurier drew upon the 
Paris of his youth. For many of the people of the tale 
he turned to friends and acquaintances of that period 
and later periods. The story of how he drew Whistler 
as Joe Sibley, the idle apprentice; of how Whistler 
stormed and threatened suit, characterizing Du Maurier 
as "a false friend," and of how Joe Sibley was changed 
to Antony, the Swiss, is an old and familiar one. About 
ten years ago there died in England a man named 
Joseph Rowley, who had been a magistrate in Flint- 
shire, and an old and close neighbour of Mr. Gladstone. 
He was the original of "Taffy" Wynne. When a 



BOHEMIAN TRAILS 123 

young student in Paris he had been a comrade of Du 
Maurier, Leighton, and Whistler, and throughout the 
entire Quarter had been noted for his prodigious strength, 
and his skill at wrestling and boxing. "The Laird" 
was drawn from T. R. Lamont, the portrait painter, who 
never quite forgave Du Maurier for the eccentric French 
attributed to him in the book. The name from which 
the story drew its title was one that had long lain perdu 
somewhere at the back of Du Maurier's head. He 
traced it to a tale by Charles Nodier, in which Trilby had 
been a man. The name Trilby also appears in a poem 
of Alfred de Musset. "From the moment the name 
occurred to me," Du Maurier once said, "I was struck 
with its value. I at once realized that it was a name 
of great importance. I think I must have felt as happy 
as Thackeray did when the title of "Vanity Fair" 
suggested itself to him." Also in the genesis of the book 
there was the story of a woman that Du Maurier had 
once heard. It suggested the hypnotism. The woman 
was probably the beautiful Elise Duval, the favourite 
model of Gerome and Benjamin Constant. 



IX. SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 

The Lesson of Laurence Sterne — The France of Kipling's 
"The Light That Failed" — The Trail of Stevenson — "R. L. 
S." in Paris, Fontainehleau, and Grez — Conan Doyle's Sher- 
lock Holmes and Brigadier Gerard — " The Refugees" — Leonard 
Merrick's Tricotrin and His Haunts — The Pans of Arnold 
Bennett — The Writing of "The Old Wives' Tale" — W. J. 
Locke's "The Beloved Vagabond" and "Septimus" — Mr. 
Locke on His Own Characters. 

SINCE Laurence Sterne made the discovery that 
"they order this matter better in France," 
and wrote the ''Sentimental Journey," EngHsh 
men of letters of all conditions and degrees of talent 
have been t'ujrning to the near-by land for direct inspira- 
tion and for occasional background. There is a Sir Walter 
Scott France in the pages of "Quentin Durward." 
The conventional beginning of a novel by G. P. R. 
James pictured two horsemen riding along a river bank, 
and in most cases the river bore a Gallic name. What- 
ever the political sympathies of Disraeli may have been, 
as a writer of fiction he invariably endowed his char- 
acters with a sympathetic appreciation of French art, 
literature, wines, and sauces. To mention only one of 
the novels of Bulwer-Lytton, there was the tale bearing 
the title: "The Parisians." Another Lytton wrote 
"Aux Italiens," beginning with the somewhat hack- 

12+ 



SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 125 

neyed lines "In Paris it was, at the Opera there." Es- 
sentially French was the genius of George Meredith. 
The story of Dickens and Thackeray in Paris and the 
French scenes and characters in their books has already 
been told, and the story of George Du Maurier and the 
city by the Seine that was so charmingly reflected in 
the pages of "Trilby," "Peter Ibbetson," and "The 
Martian." What of the younger men — the men of to- 
day or of the recent yesterday? It is quite impossible 
to think of considering them all, and few will be likely 
to quarrel with the selection of the names of Kip- 
Hng, Stevenson, Doyle, Locke, Bennett, Conrad, and 
Merrick. 

"There is of course Kipling's India and the adjacent 
lands. There is a Kipling's England of unappreciated 
richness, the England of 'They,* of 'An Habitation 
Enforced,' of *An Error in the Fourth Dimension,' 
and the incomparable stories of 'Puck of Pook's Hill.' 
There is a Kipling tale to fit every one of the Seven 
Seas. There is a Kipling's United States; the Middle 
West in 'The Naulahka'; Maine and New York City 
in 'A Walking Delegate'; California and Gloucester 
in 'Captains Courageous.' The spirit of France is 
reflected and extolled in many lines of his work. But 
where can you turn to find an actual invasion of French 
soil in KipHng narrative?" So challenged a friend of 
the Pilgrim. For the moment he had forgotten Tor- 
penhow's journey in quest of Maisie afterDick had gone 
blind as related in "The Light That Failed." Torpen- 
how's route was outlined by the Keneu, in discussion 
with the Nilghai. "He will go to Vitry-sur-Marne, 



126 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

which is on the Bezieres-Landes Railway — single track 
from Tourgas." Now although there is a Vitry-sur- 
Seine, and a Vitry-Pas-de-Calais, and a Vitry-la-Ville, 
and a Vitry-le-Fran9ois, there is no actual Vitry-sur- 
Marne. Also there is no Bezieres-Landes Railway, 
and no Tourgas. Otherwise either Vitry-le-Francois 
or Vitry-la-Ville answer all practical purposes, for they 
are in the general direction indicated, and close by the 
river Marne. Perhaps to this day lives the legend of 
the mad Enghshman who had drunk all the officers of 
the garrison under the table, had borrowed a horse from 
the lines, and had then and there eloped, after the Eng- 
lish custom, with one of those more than mad English 
girls who drew pictures down there under the care of the 
good Monsieur Kami. 

Mr. Clayton Hamilton, in his admirable "On the 
Trail of Stevenson," has told the story of " R. L. S." and 
the France that he adored. "Stevenson," wrote Mr. 
Hamilton, "lived more freely, more fully, and more hap- 
pily in France than in any other country. When Louis 
was floundering through the stormy seas of adolescence, 
Edinburgh never understood him. This is the reason 
why, for a time, he hovered very near to dashing head- 
long to hell. But in Paris, the city of the free, he re- 
covered his mental sanity. Instead of a conspiracy 
of citizens solemnly and hypocritically chanting 'Thou 
shalt not,' he found a civiHzed society that permitted 
him to think out for himself the more important prob- 
lem of Thou shalt'." 

It was on his return from Mentone in April, 1874, that 
Louils met his cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Steven- 



SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 127 

son, in Paris, and really saw the city for the first time. 
R. A. M. was a painter, and he introduced Louis to the 
town of the ateliers^ the Paris that has always left the 
deepest impression on ardent youth. The foreigner's 
Paris, which has its heart in the Place de I'Opera, he 
saw with the eyes of a stranger, but the rive gauche, 
the city of freedom and adventure, the Paris where, 
as Dante phrased it, "a youth may learn to make him- 
self eternal," he took at once to his bosom. To quote 
Mr. Hamilton: "This Paris he knew better and loved 
much more than any phase of London. He could 
wear his queer clothes, and think his queer thoughts, 
and feel his queer feelings, and pursue his queer business 
of learning how to write; and the fellows he encountered 
every day could understand him, and knew enough to 
leave him alone." 

The reminiscences of those years went into the mak- 
ing of "The Wrecker." In that book Stevenson sang 
the praises of the "Boul. Mich.", and the gardens of 
the Luxembourg, and the Rue de Rennes, and Laven- 
ue's, which is near the Gare Monparnasse, and the Ob- 
servatoire, and the Hotel de Cluny, and Roussillon 
wine. Says London Dodd, the hero of the tale: "Z. Mar- 
cas lived next door to me in my ungainly, ill-smelling 
hotel in the Rue Racine; I dined in my villainous 
restaurant with Lousteau and Rastignac: if a curricle 
nearly ran me down at a street crossing, Maxime de 
Trailles would be the driver." His knowledge of the 
painter's Paris was also utilized in the second story of 
"The New Arabian Nights," where the American, 
Silas Q. Scuddamore, experiences a series of unusual 



128 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 



adventures at the Bal Bullier. That famous dance 
of the students of the Quarter is described with a wealth 
of detail. Francis Scrymgeour found the House with 
the Green BHnds far up the slope of Montmartre, in 
the Rue Lepic, commanding a view of all Paris and 

enjoying the pure air 
of the heights. It 
was a typical house of 
the Montmartre of 
the'seventies, and 
there was a high gar- 
den wall protected by 
chevaux-de-frise. 
Francis, after adven- 
tures in the House 
with the Green Blinds, 
took to his heels down 
the lane that leads to 
the Rue Ravignan. 
The Rue Lepic, the 
Rue Ravignan, and 
the connecting lane 
may all easily be 
found to-day. In 
that one episode there 
is more of a definite 
Paris than there is of a definite London in all *'Dr. Jekyll 
and Mr. Hyde." It was not merely in contemporary 
Paris that Stevenson was at home. Prowling through the 
Latin Quarter he delighted in mentally reconstructing it 
as it had been two or three or four centuries before. If the 




a street of stevenson s 
nights" 



NEW ARABIAN 



SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 129 

subject under consideration is the city of Victor Hugo's 
"Notre Dame," or the ride of D'Artagnan to Belle-Isle, 
as related in *'Le Vicomte de Bragelonne," or the town 
that knew Fran9ois Villon, in some one of Stevenson's 
essays there is always a fitting quotation to be found. 
It was his personal knowledge of the Quarter supple- 
mented by his sympathetic grasp of the spirit of the 
writers of the past that gave him the material he needed 
for his tales of mediaeval France. 

*' Stevenson's interest in the history of Paris," to 
revert to Mr. Hamilton's book, "would scarcely be 
worth recording were it not for the fact that he never 
showed the slightest interest in the history of London. 
His London — so to speak — is devoid of any past; but his 
Paris stretches back through the centuries. The first 
story that he ever published was a tale of mediaeval 
Paris, "A Lodging for the Night." In origin, it was an 
offshoot from two of the critical papers which were later 
collected in "Familiar Studies of Men and Books" — 
the essay on Victor Hugo's romances and the essay on 
Francois Villon. In this great story Stevenson looked 
at Villon through the eyes of Victor Hugo. The tale 
is utterly original in style. A Paris of the past is re- 
created by a master hand. But "A Lodging for the 
Night" — despite its manifest, peculiar merits — may be 
regarded as the sort of story Hugo would have written 
if he, too, had made a thorough study of the life and 
work of the greatest vandal among noets, the greatest 
poet among vandals. 

"Stevenson's second story, 'The Sire de Maletroit's 
Door,' is also set in mediaeval France. It is a sort of 



130 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

tale that old Dumas might have told if he had ever had 
sufficient leisure to develop the finished style of R. L. S. 
The story happens in a nameless town. We are in- 
formed that the hero, Denis de Beaulieu, is a resident 
of Bourges; and scene of the tale may be imagined as a 
lesser Bourges, more dark and little and intimate and 
thrilling. There are glimpses of Gothic architecture 
in this story that show us that Stevenson had used his 
eyes to better advantage in France than he ever used 
them in England. In France, where his eyes were 
open, he could see the past; in England, where his eyes 
were shut, he could scarcely see the present." 

Perhaps there was no period of Stevenson's always 
romantic life of more enduring interest than the Fon- 
tainebleau period. To the Forest he was introduced 
in April, 1875, by the same R. A. M. S. who a year before 
had showed him the Latin Quarter. The cousins made 
their headquarters at Siron's, in Barbizon, where they 
were knoWn as *'Stennis aine" and "Stennis frere. 
*'The Wrecker'* pictures them under these names in 
pages that are drawn directly from the life. "He was 
a great walker in those days," says Mr. Hamilton, 
"and explored not only the forest itself, but all the 
towns of the adjacent countryside. He knew not only 
Barbizon, but Marlotte, Montigny, and Chailly-en- 
Biere, Cemay-la-Ville, Bourron, Moret, Nemours, and 
Grez. The traveller who visits any of these entrancing 
little tow;ns will find himself walking in the footsteps 
of R. L. S. It is no longer necessary to describe them; 
they have been described for all time in the two essays 
in which Louis has recounted his memories of this dis- 



SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 131 

trict — the paper entitled " Fontainebleau," and the 
paper entitled "Forest Notes." 

After Barbizon, Stevenson's favourite haunt in the 
district was Grez. In the summer of 1875 he wrote 
to his mother: "I have been three days at a place 
called Grez, a pretty and very melancholy village on 
the plain. A low bridge, with many arches choked 
with sedge; green fields of white and yellow water-lilies; 
poplars and willows innumerable; and about it all such 
an atmosphere of sadness and slackness, one could do 
nothing but get into the boat and out of it again, and 
yawn for bedtime." Later, in the essay called "Fon- 
tainebleau" he was in another mood. "But Grez is a 
merry place after its kind; pretty to see, merry to 
inhabit. The course of its pellucid river, whether up 
or down, is full of attractions for the navigator; the 
mirror and inverted images of trees, lilies, and mills, 
and the foam and thunder of weirs. And of all noble 
sweeps of roadway, none is nobler, on a windy dusk, 
than the highroad to Nemours between its lines of talk- 
ing poplar.'* It was at Grez that Stevenson, aged 
twenty-five, met the woman, aged thirty-seven, who was 
later to become his wife. ' 

To find the invented character closest to the heart of 
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would be a matter, not of visit- 
ing the rooms in Upper Baker Street, London, to en- 
counter the most widely known personage in all fiction 
enveloped in a dressing gown and thick clouds of shag 
tobacco smoke, but of prowling among certain Paris 
cafes of 1845 or thereabouts in search of a talkative 
vieux grognard of the First Empire with a strong Gascon 



132 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

accent. For despite the world-wide popularity of his 
creation Doyle never loved Sherlock Holmes, whereas 
he has always adored Colonel Etienne Gerard of the 
Hussar of Conflans. The exploits of Gerard do not, in 
themselves, save in a few instances, belong to Paris; 
they are the tales of Russian ice and snow, of castles 
of gloom in Poland, of treachery lurking in moldy 
canal-laved houses of Venice, of mountain peaks in 
Portugal, of the English prison of Dartmoor, of the 
lonely rock of St. Helena. But the telling of them 
does, and, through the medium of the grizzled Brigadier 
sipping his glass of wine, garrulous as the memory of 
the great days through which he has lived surge within 
him, yet feeling the call of the beloved Gascony of his 
boyhood, Doyle has poured out all his joyously acquired 
and marvellously transmuted knowledge of the Napo- 
leonic period, and the men with the hairy knapsacks 
and the hearts of steel whose tramp shook the continent 
for so many years. 

Immensely proud is Conan Doyle of that collection 
of Napoleonic military memoirs out of which grew the 
vainglorious yet altogether delightful Gerard. Glow- 
ingly he told of it in "Through the Magic Door," per- 
haps the least read although one of the finest of all his 
books. "Here," he said, "is Marbot, the first of all 
soldier books in the world. Marbot gives you the point 
of view of the officer. So does De Segfur and De 
Fezensac and Colonel Gonville, each in some different 
branch of the service. But some are from the pens of the 
men in the ranks, and they are even more graphic than 
the others. Here, for example, are the papers of good 



SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 133 

old Cogniet, who was a grenadier of the Guard, and 
could neither read nor write until the great wars were 
over. A tougher soldier never went into battle. Here 
is Sergeant Bourgogne, also with his dreadful account 
of that nightmare campaign in Russia, and the gallant 
Chevillet, trumpeter of Chasseurs, with his matter- 
of-fact account of all that he saw, where the daily 
'combat* is sandwiched in between the real business of 
the day, which was foraging for his frugal breakfast 
and supper." Where was the cafe honoured by the 
patronage and reminiscence of Gerard? That is a 
matter for the pleasant, harmless play of the imagina- 
tion. Any haunt will do, such a one, for example, as 
Thackeray sang in "The Chronicle of the Drum": 

At Paris, hard by the Maine barriers. 

Whoever will choose to repair, 
Midst a dozen of wooden legged warriors 

May haply fall in with old Pierre. 
On the sunshiny side of a tavern 

He sits and he prates of old wars, 
And moistens his pipe of tobacco 

With a drink that is named after Mars, 

There is, of course, no such thing as a Sherlock Holmes 
Paris trail. But every now and then in the stories occur 
references to the French capital, allusions to hurried 
trips made by the great man across the Channel, either 
for professional purposes or for relaxation after some 
particularly baffling problem has been solved. Also 
we know that there was constant communication be- 
tween Upper Baker Street and the French secret service. 



134 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

and Holmes was forever tossing across the table to 
Watson cablegrams filled with such expressions of 
admiration as "magnifique" and " coup-de-maitre." 
Perhaps some day, when Doyle sees fit to tell us more 
of his hero's activities in the Great War than he related 
in "His Last Bow," we shall be introduced to a M. 
Sherlock Holmes, temporarily at least, citoyen de Paris. 
There is a very concrete old Paris of Conan Doyle. 
It is the city of "The Refugees," a tale which began 

in the France of the 
laterlife of Louis XIV, 
when that monarch, 
under the influence of 
Madame de Main- 
tenon, was reviving 
with extreme severity 
the edicts against 
those of the Huguenot 
faith. Much research 
went into the making 
of that book with the 
result that there is to 
the story the genuine 
flavour of old streets. 
At the comer of the 
Rue Saint-Martin and 
the Rue de Biron 
was the house of the 

OLD RUE SAINT-MARTIN r^ • ^ 

merchant Catmat, the 
father of the heroine Adele, "a narrow building, four 
stories in height, grim and grave like its owner, with high 




SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 135 

peaked roof, long diamond paned windows, a framework 
of black wood, with gray plaster jfilling the interstices, and 
five stone steps which led up to the narrow and sombre 
door." That structure was the scene of the Paris half 
of "The Refugees," when the tale was not revolving 
about the sun-like magnificence of the royal Louis. 
From there the little party bound for the religious 
freedom promised by the New World made its way by 
night to the city gates, thence to Rouen, and then by 
boat through the winding Seine to the open sea. 

The Tricotrin of Leonard Merrick is a true lineal 
descendant of the Rodolphe of Henry Murger, and he 
is quite as French. For Merrick knows his Paris as 
well as he knows his London, and of the two, obviously 
prefers the French capital. If Tricotrin happened to 
survive the Great War it should not be difficult to find 
him. He lives up six flights of stairs in an attic in 
Montmartre. He is a poet whose poems are unprinted, 
just as his friend Pitou is a musician whose music is 
never played, as his friend Flamant is a painter whose 
pictures are never sold or exhibited, and as his friend 
Lajeunie is a playwright whose pieces are never 'pro- 
duced. It is the four of Murger over again. Tricotrin 
has an uncle in the provinces — a silk manufacturer of 
Lyons — who earnestly wishes the young man to forsake 
his unconventional ways and embark in trade. That 
is of course what Tricotrin will do eventually, but in 
the meantime he prefers to remain in his attic, dining 
on a herring, flaunting his long hair and shabby clothes 
on the boulevards, and building fine day-dreams of 
fortune and renown. From time to time the sun of 



136 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

prosperity emerges from the clouds and for a brief 
moment shines upon Tricotrin. For example, on one 
occasion, he is employed to contribute to a newly estab- 
lished journal in a remote town a weekly letter on the 
theatrical life of Paris. Dining on the herring in the 
Montmartre attic his imagination is not hampered by 
unsympathetic fact. In his opinions of performances 
he discreetly agrees with the FigarOy but in his para- 
graphs he "sups" and "chats" with all sorts of promi- 
nent people. His invisible telephone is a fountain of 
perpetual inspiration. "Why," he confides, "to- 
morrow Yvette Guilbert is going to call me up the 
moment she returns from London to tell me of her pro- 
fessional worries and to beg me for my advice. As 
she will be prostrated by the journey, I am not sure 
but that, ^adding to her entreaties, I may even jump 
into an auto-taxi and take pot-luck in her delightful 
home." 

Of course the day comes when the editor of the remote 
paper decides to visit Paris in order that Tricotrin may 
introduce him to some of the celebrities of literature 
and the stage. The poet, at his wits' ends, calls upon 
his friends for help. They respond nobly, all except 
Lajeunie, who selfishly refuses to shave his head in 
order that Tricotrin may introduce him to the visiting 
editor as Edmond Rostand. A dozen stories, twenty 
stories, might be told of Tricotrin, his expedients, his 
gallantries, and of the Paris of his wanderings. He has 
his moral shortcomings, but they merely add to the 
picture. Taken all in all Tricotrin is the most delight- 
ful Bohemian of the fiction of the last two decades. 




The Rue du Haut Pave, looking toward the Pantheon. "There are 
in Paris certain streets," wrote the great Honore de Balzac in "Ferragus," 
"as dishonoured as can be any man convicted of infamy. . . . There 
are murderous streets, and streets older than the oldest possible dowagers." 



SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 137 

But there is a Leonard Merrick Paris which does not 
depend upon Tricotrin and his long-haired companions. 
It is the reminiscent city of "Conrad in Quest of His 
Youth.*' Trying to bring back the flavour of the past 
Conrad sampled the hospitaHty of a Httle hotel on the 
left bank, in the Rue du Haut Pave, and puffed his 
cigarettes in the Cafe Vachette and the; Cafe d'Har- 
court. It is the whimsical city of "The Suicides of the 
Rue Sombre." It is the tragical city of "The Back of 
Bohemia." It is the fantastic city of "Little-Flower- 
of-the-Wood." It is the enchanted city of "The 
Prince in the Fairy Tale." There is, in the last-named 
story, one paragraph alone that establishes Leonard 
Merrick's claim to be considered as one of the interpre- 
ters in fiction oila ville lumiere. ** I have never, " he says, 
"seen a city that opens it eyes as good-humouredly as 
Paris. In pictures it is always shown to us at night, 
with its myriad lamps shining, or in the afternoon, 
when it is frivolous, and its fountains flash; but in my 
own little unimportant opinion, if one would know 
Paris at its sweetest and best one should get up very 
early, and behold it when it wakes to work." Again, 
in rather unkindly criticism of beautiful Brussels he 
has said something to this effect: "Stopping at Brussels 
en route for Paris is like calling upon the sister of the 
woman with whom you are in love." 

The cafe that figured in "Little-Flower-of-the-Wood" 
was high up toward the summit of Montmartre and 
was long known as the "White Wolf. " But in the new 
edition of his books Mr. Merrick has changed that name 
to another, for reasons which he has outlined in the 



138 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

course of a recent letter to the present Pilgrim. Now 
the restaurant made famous by the whim of the reign- 
ing dancer of the moment is the "Cafe of the Good Old 
Times.*' "Long after the story had been pubHshed," 
says Mr. Merrick, **I came across this name over a 
little workman's cafe, a debit, on a country road some- 
where, and it was so exceedingly appropriate to the 
story that I regretted that I had not struck it sooner. 
I have never heard of any cafe of this name in Paris; 
and the story of * Little-Flower-of-the-Wood ' is purely 
fiction. It was suggested by the fact that these two 
disparate classes of trade obtained simultaneously after 
midnight at an actual cafe in Paris — champagne suppers 
and fortunate cocottes on the first floor, and humble 
onion soup and the unsuccessful sisterhood downstairs. 
The contrast between the two clienteles was so dramatic 
that it cried aloud for a story. 

"The name of the cafe frequented by Tricotrin and 
his circle," Mr. Merrick goes on, "has been changed to 
the /Cafe of the Beautiful Future.' The name is, I 
believe, imaginary. There ought to have been an 
artistic cafe in Paris called the *Cafe of the Beautiful 
Future' so I have done what I could do to fill the void. 
All^of my short stories — prior to *While Paris Laughed' — 
that I wished to see reprinted, are in the two volumes, 
'A Chair on the Boulevard' and 'The Man Who Under- 
stood Women,' and there are many revisions of names. 
All stories peopled by French characters are assembled 
in the former. 'The Back of Bohemia' and *The Prince 
in the Fairy Tale' and other tales dealing with Anglo- 
Saxons are contained in the latter. 



SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 139 

"You ask me if there was a real Tricotrin. There 
were many, but my Tricotrin is not a portrait of any one 
in particular. This applies equally to Pitou and the 
cafe. Tricotrin's origin in fiction? I suppose, pri- 
marily, sympathy with the French temperament, in- 
terest in French art, and the fascination that the true 
types of Montmartre — as distinguished from the night 
visitors from the Grand Boulevard — always exercised 
upon me. All the same, when I wrote my first story 
of Tricotrin and Pitou ('The Tragedy of a Comic 
Song') I had no notion that they would ever reappear 
in any further story. Their longevity was not designed 
by me. They have persisted because, to me at all 
events, they were very much alive, very dear. Ill 
health has prevented me from seeing Paris since the 
early part of the war, and I am wondering very anxi- 
ously whether I shall find them alive when I go back — in 
other words, how much of the fife of Montmartre the 
war has left. It is quite possible that I may find that 
I can never write to them any more, for lacking the 
familiar atmosphere, I think they would be pathetic 
figures. Personally, I found it sad to meet the Mus- 
keteers again in their middle-age and ' Fingt Ans Apres.' 
But as war does not recreate human nature, though we 
are asked to believe that this one has re-created it, there 
will be new Tricotrins and Pitous born in France in every 
generation. Not war, but the end of the world will have 
to come before her artistry and sentiment perish. 

"I do not, at the moment, recall any precise portrait 
in any of my stones of France excepting in 'The Ban- 
quets of Kiki' — in 'While Paris Laughed.* Grospiron 



I40 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

lives. And Madame Grospiron, if she is spared, will 
fulfill the picture of her about thirty years hence. 
When I saw her last she was still a 'plump, rosy girl 
with a violent mother. ' By the way, here is an example 
of the literary instinct to be found in almost every 
grade of the French. At a cafe I had noticed a woman, 
like the woman described in the story 'A Piece of Sugar' 
('While Paris Laughed'), surreptitiously pocket a few 
matches. It looked more pitiful than it sounds. 
While I was still wondering how I could handle the in- 
cident, I happened to speak of it in the hearing of that 
violent mother — uneducated, of the lower classes. 
Instantaneously she broke in, * Poor soul. But it would 
have been even more dramatic if she had pocketed a 
piece of sugar!' Impossible to imagine an English- 
woman of the lower classes saying that. 

"I have omitted to say that Tricotrin and Pitou 
live — or lived — whichever it may prove to be — in Mont- 
martre because it was the only district for them. Not 
a few critics, both on your side and here, insist on re- 
ferring to them as denizens of the Latin Quarter, but 
as you doubtless know as well as I, Murger's Latin 
Quarter and the modern Latin Quarter were two widely 
different things." 

For the Paris of Arnold Bennett turn to "The Old 
Wives' Tale." In his introduction to that story he 
told how, in the autumn of 1903, he was in the habit 
of dining frequently in a restaurant in the Rue de Clichy 
and how there he saw the two giggling waitresses and 
the grotesque old woman whose plight stirred him to 
the thought that she had once been young, with the 



SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 141 

unique charm of youth in her form and movements 
and in her mind. "It was at this instant that I was 
visited by the idea of writing the book which ultimately 
became *The Old Wives' Tale/" What follows is, 
in a measure, a revelation of Arnold Bennett's literary 
creed: 



I put aside the idea for a long time, but it was never very distant 
from me. For several reasons it made a special appeal to me. I 
had always been a convinced admirer of Mrs. W. K. Clifford's most 
precious novel, "Aunt Anne," but I wanted to see in the story of an 
old woman many things that Mrs. Clifford had omitted from "Aunt 
Anne." Moreover, I had always revolted against the absurd youth- 
fulness, the unfading youthfulness of the average heroine. And as 
a protest against this fashion, I was already, in 1903, planning a novel 
("Leonora") of which the heroine was aged forty, and had daughters 
old enough to be in love. But I meant to go much farther than 
forty. Finally, as a supreme reason, I had the example and the 
challenge of Guy de Maupassant's "Une Vie." In the 'nineties we 
used to regard "Une Vie" with mute awe, as being the summit of 
achievement in fiction. And I remember being very cross with 
Mr. Bernard Shaw-because, having read "Une Vie" at the suggestion 
(I think) of Mr. William Archer, he failed to see in it anything very 
remarkable. Here I must confess that, in 1908, I read "Une Vie" 
again, and in spite of a natural anxiety to differ from Mr. Bernard 
Shaw, I was gravely disappointed with it. It is a fine novel, but 
decidedly inferior to "Pierre et Jean" or even "Fort Comme la Mort." 
To return to the year 1903. "Une Vie" relates the entire Ufe history 
of a woman. I settled in the privacy of my own head that my book 
about the development of a young girl into a stout old lady must be 
the English "Une Vie." I have been accused of every fault except a 
lack of self-confidence, and in a few weeks I settled a further point, 
namely, that my book must go one better than "Une Vie" and that to 
this end it must be the life history of two women instead of only one. 
Hence "The Old Wives' Tale" has two heroines. 



142 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

For a long time Mr. Bennett was intimidated by the 
audacity of his project, but he had sworn to carry it out. 
Five or six novels of smaller scope were produced before 
he turned his hand to the big task. That was in the 
autumn of 1907. He began the writing of "The Old 
Wives' Tale" in a village near Fontainebleau, where he 
had rented half a house from a retired railway servant. 
The apparent length to which the story was to run ap- 
palled him. It was to be a matter of no less than two 
hundred thousand words. To reassure himself he 
counted the words in several famous Victorian novels 
and found that they averaged four hundred thousand 
words. The first part of "The Old Wives' Tale" was 
written in six weeks. Then, in a London hotel, the 
author came to an impasse^ and put the story aside 
temporarily in order to write "Buried AHve." That 
done, he returned to Fontainebleau, and finished "The 
Old Wives' Tale " there at the end of July, 1908. When 
he came to the French portion of the story he saw that 
the Siege of Paris fitted chronologically. For first- 
hand information he turned to his landlord. 



I was aware that my railway servant and his wife had been living 
in Paris at the time of the war. I said to the old man: "By the 
way, you went through the Siege of Paris, didn't you?" He turned 
to his old wife and said, uncertainly: "The Siege of Paris? Yes, we 
did, didn't we?" The Siege had been only one incident among many 
in their hves. Of course they remembered it well, though not 
vividly, and I gained much information from them. But the most 
useful thing that I gained from them was the perception, starthng 
at first, that ordinary people went on living very ordinary lives in 
Paris during the Siege, and that to the vast mass of the population 



SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 143 

the Siege was not the dramatic, spectacular, thrilling, ecstatic affair 
that is described in history. 

Conceived in a Paris restaurant, begun and finished 
in a Paris suburb, "The Old Wives' Tale" is rich in a 
Paris that the Second Empire bequeathed to us little 
changed. Gerald and Sophia on their honeymoon 
went to stay at the Hotel Meurice, then as now in the 
Rue de Rivoli, facing the Tuileries Gardens. In later 
and less affluent days they occupied a three-cornered 
bedroom of a little hotel at the angle of the Rue Fon- 
taine (the street in which the Forestiers of Maupassant's 
"Bel-Ami" lived) and the Rue Laval (later renamed 
the Rue Victor Masse). It is on the slope of Mont- 
martre, within a stone's throw of the Boulevard de 
Chchy. Eventually Sophia became the proprietress 
of the Pension Frensham in the Rue Lord-Byron, a 
winding street of the Champs-Elysees quarter, very near 
the Arc de Triomphe. An event of her early Paris days 
was the journey to Auxerre to witness an execution. 
Never having been present at an execution Mr. Bennett 
based his description upon a series of articles he had 
read in a Paris newspaper. Frank Harris, discussing 
"The Old Wives' Tale" in London Vanity Fair, 
said that it was clear that the author had not seen an 
execution, and proceeded to describe one himself. "It 
was," said Mr, Bennett, "a brief but terribly convincing 
bit of writing, quite characteristic and quite worthy 
of the author of 'Montes the Matador' and of a man 
who had been almost everywhere and seen almost 
everything." 



144 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

I comprehended how far short I had fallen of the truth! I wrote 
to Mr. Frank Harris, regretting that his description had not been 
printed before I wrote mine, as I should assuredly have utilized it, 
and, of course, I admitted that I had never witnessed an execution. 
He simply replied: "Neither have I." This detail is worth pre- 
serving, for it is a reproof to that large body of readers who, when a 
novelist has really carried conviction to them, assert ofFhand: "Oh, 
that must be autobiography!" 

No Englishman of our time has loved Paris more and 
interpreted it more sympathetically than Mr. W. J. 
Locke. A mythical street, somewhere in the Latin 
Quarter, is the Rue des Saladiers. There, at No. ii, 
was the atelier Janot, associated with "The Beloved 
Vagabond." Near by was the Cafe Delphine, where 
Paragot exercised a dictatorship similar to that he had 
enjoyed at the Lotus Club, in Tavistock Street, Covent 
Garden, when Asticot first became his faithful chattel. 
To Paragot, Parks was the "Boul. Mich." In "Septi- 
mus," Zora Middlemist, at the time of the first visit, 
stayed at the Grand Hotel, but Septimus Dix, who 
knew Paris in a queer dim way of his own, lived in an 
obscure hotel of the rive gauche. After Septimus had 
chivalrously given Zora's sister the shelter of his name he 
found for Emmy an apartment in the Boulevard Raspail, 
repairing himself to the near-by Hotel Godet. Of some 
of these scenes and people the Pilgrim quotes from a let- 
ter recently received from Mr. Locke. The letter, written 
from Nice, ends: "You seel am in the delectable land 
once more, after five years of gray English skies." 

I am afraid I can give you nothing very useful concerning the 
■provenance (origin) of "The Beloved Vagabond." Paragot was 



SOME OF THE LATER ENGLISHMEN 145 

taken from no individual. When starting him my memory went 
back to the early 'eighties when I used to fool about the rive gauche, 
and where one often saw, in the same cafe, day after day, some el- 
derly philosophic ruffian, generally fiercely bearded, laying down the 
law on sculpture, painting, and the non-existence of the Deity. 
Some were veritable debased geniuses — Verlaine of course the shining 
exemplar — some were still so-called students, because they hked the 
idleness and the aromatic smell of the *'Boul. Mich." at the absinthe 
hour, some were hungry blackguards, des pique-assiette (dinner 
hunters) willing for a consideration to render the young and shy any 
kind of dubious service. 

After a lapse of twenty years — I wrote "The Beloved Vagabond" 
in 1905-06 — I retained no memory of any one individual, but I 
fashioned Paragot out of my blurred impressions of the type. In 
fact, all the characters in my novels are drawn either from type or 
invented as a possible human being. I have never drawn from the 
living model. 

So Aristide Pujol is drawn from type. You can see him at any 
cafe on the Cannebiere of Marseilles or at commercial table d'hotes 
at Aix-en-Provence or Tarascon. I met his counterpart for two 
minutes, in Robinson Crusoe motoring goatskins, on an occasion 
when I had lost my way motoring, and with excited good will he put 
me wise. 

The phrasing of the end of the last sentence is clear 
evidence that Mr. Locke's visits to the United States 
have not been entirely fruitless. 



X. ZOLA'S PARIS 

The Bitter Years of Apprenticeship — The World Seen from a 
Garret — Employment at Hachette's — First Published Books — 
At Flaubert's Table — The Story of the House at Medan — Paris 
Streets and the Novels of the " Rougon-Macquart" — Dram 
Shops, Markets, and Depart7nent Stores. 

WITH the conspicuous exception of Gustave 
Flaubert there was hardly a master of French 
fiction of the nineteenth century who did not 
serve his literary apprenticeship in Bohemia, using that 
term to indicate a condition of dire want rather than a 
period of care-free gayety. Victor Hugo, already ac- 
claimed as the "subUme child," was reduced to such 
existence as an income of seven hundred francs a year 
made possible. Balzac in his garret in the Rue Lesdi- 
guieres undermined his health and shortened his days 
by overwork and under nourishment. Dumas's con- 
dition after his arrival from his native Villers-Cotterets 
was financially about as precarious as that of the D'Artag- 
nan of his creation, coming up to town from Tarbes. 
Daudet and his brother lived in an attic in the Rue 
MoufFetard. Emile Zola, at twenty-five years of age, 
found employment that paid him forty cents a day. 
After two months at the work he threw it up, and from 
the beginning of March, i860, till the end of that year 
then all through 1861, and the first three months of 

146 



ZOLA'S PARIS 147 

1862, he led what one of his biographers, Ernest Vize- 
telly, has called "a life of dire Bohemian poverty." 
Here is the story of his early Paris homes. 

On his arrival in Paris in February, 1858, he lived with 
his mother at No. 63 Rue Monsieur le Prince. That 
street, which Daudet described so vividly in "Les Rois 
en Exil" as the home of Elysee Meraut, is familiar to 
any one with any knowledge of the Latin Quarter, and 
retains much of its old-world quaintness and flavour. 
From there the Zolas moved in January, 1859, to No. 241 
Rue Saint-Jacques, and thence in April, i860, to a cheap- 
er lodging at No. 3 5 Rue Saint- Victor, a short, narrow 
street still to be found near the Square Monge. There, 
according to Vizetelly, Zola's room was one of a few 
lightly built garrets, raised over the house-roof proper, 
and constituting a seventh "floor"; the leads in front 
forming a terrace whence the view embraced nearly 
all Paris. To share this precarious existence came Paul 
Cezanne, and the two friends dreamed of conquering 
Paris, one as a poet, and the other as a painter. In 
summer they often spent the night on the terrace dis- 
cussing art and literature. 

But matters grew worse before they began to im- 
prove. Zola was obliged to part from his mother, who 
with the assistance of friends and her own skill with 
the needle found refuge in a pension in the quarter, 
while the son, unwilling longer to sponge on Cezanne, 
sought an even humbler attic in the Rue Neuve Saint- 
£tienne-du-Mont, near the ancient church. One after 
another his few belongings were carried away to the 
pawn shop; occasionally he borrowed a small sum from 



148 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

an acquaintance; his diet was bread and water, with 
now and then an apple or a bit of cheese; a pipeful of 
tobacco was a rare luxury, and his great daily problem 
was to find three sous with which to purchase a candle 
for the next evening's work. Often the problem was 
not solved. Lying in the darkness he was forced to 
commit to memory the lines of verse that surged in his 
brain. For like nearly all young French men of letters, 
it was to poetry that Zola first turned. 

Finally, for non-payment of rent, he was evicted from 
the attic in the RueNeuve Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, and 
went to a furnished room house near the Pantheon in 
the Rue Soufflet before that street had been widened 
to the dimensions of the present day. The life there 
was so riotous that the police found frequent occasion 
to interfere. To quote Vizetelly on the Latin Quarter 
period of Zola's life and its influence on his work of 
later years: 

The long winter ends, the spring comes, and Zola turns to enjoy 
the sun rays — at times in the Jardin des Plantes, which is near his 
lodging, at others along the quais of the Seine, where he spends 
hours among the thousands of second-hand books displayed for 
sale on the parapets. And all the hfe of the river, the whole pic- 
turesque panorama of the quays as they were then, becomes fixed in 
his mind, to supply, many years afterward, the admirable descrip- 
tive passages given in the fourth chapter of his novel "L'CEuvre." 
There it is Claude Lantier who is shown walking the quays with his 
sweetheart Christine. And Zola was certainly not alone every time 
that he himself paced them. We know to what a young man's fancy 
turns in springtime. He lived, moreover, in the Quartier Latin, 
which still retained some of its old freedom of life, in spite of the 
many changes it was undergoing. 



ZOLA'S PARIS 149 

In February, 1863, Zola entered the employ of the 
publishing house of Hachette and Company as a packer 
at a salary of one hundred francs a month. Small as 
the sum was it enabled him to leave Bohemia behind, 
and after he had adjusted himself to regular hours, his 
chief worry was his inability to read all the books that 
passed through his hands. After leaving the Rue Souf- 
flot he lived, in turn, in the Impasse Saint-Dominique, 
in the Rue Neuve de la Pepiniere, and then in the Rue 
des Feuillantines, to which allusion will be found in the 
chapter on Victor Hugo. It was there that he began 
"La Confession de Claude," which, however, was laid 
aside in order that the writer might devote himself to 
short stories. 

One day Zola submitted the manuscript of a poetical 
trilogy to his employer. Hachette would not publish, 
but he offered encouragement, and raised the young 
man's salary to two hundred francs a month. That 
enabled Zola to take his mother again to live with him, 
and the two found quarters in the Rue Saint-Jacques, 
where gathered the band of friends afterward de- 
scribed in ""'L'CEuvre." Then, in October, 1864, the 
firm of Hetzel and Lacroix, the latter the ambitious 
publisher of "Les Miserables," issued Zola's "Contes 
a Ninon." The conditions of pubHcation were that the 
author was to receive no immediate payment, but 
Zola was satisfied, for the book made him known and 
served as an entering wedge to the columns of the news- 
papers and the reviews. A year later Lacroix brought 
out "La Confession de Claude." This time the author 
received a 10 per cent, royalty, which amounted to 



150 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

six cents on every copy sold. The entire edition was 
however only fifteen hundred copies, and Zola's con- 
sequent profit less than a hundred dollars. Yet he felt 
himself ready to give up his position at Hachette's and 
plunge into the uncertain stream of journalism and 
literature. 

The Paris of the first period of Emile Zola's life may 
be summed up as an attic in the Latin Quarter; of the 
third period, a country house in a remote suburb; the 
second period is represented by a dinner table, one of 
the most famous dinner tables of literature, that of 
Gustave Flaubert. The Rougon-Macquait structure 
had been elaborately planned, the Franco-Prussian War 
had taken place, driving Zola to Marseilles and Bor- 
deaux, the normal tenor of Hfe had been resumed in an 
atmosphere of steadily increasing prosperity. Flau- 
bert's house was then in the Rue Murillo, near the Pare 
Monceau, and there Zola became an habitue, one of 
the intimate circle that included, besides the host, Ed- 
mond de Goncourt (Jules de Goncourt had recently 
died), the Russian TurgeniefF, Alphonse Daudet, and 
Flaubert's pupil, Guy de Maupassant, then in his 
early twenties. "We met there every Sunday," 
Daudet wrote in "Trente Ans de Paris," "five or 
six of us, always the same, upon a most delightfully 
intimate footing. No admittance for mutes and 
bores." 

Even when the dinners were held elsewhere than in 
Flaubert's house they seem still to have been in a mea- 
sure Flaubert dinners. "It was about this time," con- 
tinues Daudet in "Trente Ans de Paris/' *'that the 



ZOLA'S PARIS 151 

suggestion was made of a monthly meeting around a 
bountifully spread table; it was called the *Flaubert 
dinner,' or the 'dinner of authors who have been hissed.' 
Flaubert was admitted by virtue of the failure of his 
'Candidat'; Zola, with 'Bouton de Rose'; Goncourt, with 
'Henriette Marechal' ; I, with my 'Arlesienne.' Girardin 
tried to insinuate himself into our circle; he was not a 
literary man, so we rejected him. As for Turgenieff, 
he gave us his word that he had been hissed in Russia; 
and as it was a long distance away we did not go there 
to see. 

''There could be nothing more delightful than these 
dinner parties of friends, where we talked without re- 
straint, with minds alert and elbows on the tablecloth. 
Like men of experience we were all gourmands. There 
were as many different varieties of gluttony as there 
were temperaments; as many tastes as provinces rep- 
resented. Flaubert must have Normandy butter and 
Rouen ducks a Vetouffade; Edmond de Goncourt, with 
his delicate, exotic appetite, ordered sweetmeats fla- 
voured with ginger; Zola, shell-fish; TurgeniefF smacked 
his lips over the caviare. 

"Ah! we were not easily fed, and the Parisian res- 
taurants must remember us. We often changed. At 
one time we dined at Adolphe and Pele's, behind the 
Opera, at another time on the Place de I'Opera- 
Comique; then at Voisin's, where the cellar satisfied all 
our demands and won the favour of our appetites. We 
sat down at seven o'clock, and at two we had not fin- 
ished. Flaubert and Zola dined in their shirt-sleeves. 
Turgenieff reclined on the couch; we turned the waiters 



152 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

out of the room — an entirely useless precaution, for 
Flaubert's roar could be heard from top to bottom of the 
house. And we talked literature. We always had one 
of our own books which had just appeared." 

It was in 1877, when he was first enriched by the 
sales of "L'Assommoir," that Zola discovered the house 
in which his later life and work were bound up. It 
is perhaps stretching a point to speak of Medan as Paris, 
for it is a little town of the remote environs, that over- 
looks the Seine, beyond Poissy. Yet, relatively, the 
cottage at Fordham was as far from the city when Poe 
lived there, yet it is always considered as a New York 
home of the author of "The Raven." And Zola's 
Medan house has a story that is well worth telling. Zola, 
who at first wished merely to rent it, v^as persuaded to 
buy, the original purchase price being nine thousand 
francs. That was only the beginning. In the Medan 
property that survived him ma}^ be read in part the 
story of his literary successes. Most of his money was 
lavished there. The first additional building that he 
caused to be erected was a large square tower in which 
was a spacious workroom. In that room most of the 
later books were written. The tower was the "L'As- 
sommoir Tower," for it was built from part of the re- 
turns from "L'Assommoir." In time a second tower 
was added. This was the "Nana Tower," a memorial 
erected from the proceeds of the most successful, finan- 
cially, of all the novels of the Rougon-Macquart. Other 
improvements came into being when the money poured 
in from the sales of "La Terre," and "La Debacle." 
The startling interior decoration of Medan is best ex- 



ZOLA'S PARIS 153 

plained by a passage from "L'CEuvre," which Zola 
dehberately intended as a self-revelation: 

The drawing room was becoming crowded with old furniture, old 
tapestry, nicknacks of all countries and all times — an overflowing 
torrent of things which had begun at Batignolles with an old pot of 
Rouen ware, which Henriette had given her husband on one of his 
fete days. They ran about the curiosity shops together; they felt a 
joyful passion for buying; and he now satisfied the old longings of 
his youth, the romanticist aspirations which the first books he had 
read had engendered. Thus this writer, who was so fiercely modern, 
lived among the worm-eaten middle ages of which he had dreamed 
when he was a lad of fifteen. As an excuse, he laughingly declared 
that the handsome modern furniture cost too much, whereas with old 
things, even common ones, one immediately obtained effect and 
colour. There was nothing of the collector about him, his one con- 
cern was decoration, broad effects; and to tell the truth, the drawing 
room, lighted by two lamps of old Delft ware, derived quite a soft, 
warm tone from the dull gold of the dalmatlcas used for upholstering 
the seats, the yellow incrustations of the Italian cabinets and Dutch 
show-cases, the faded hues of Oriental door-hangings, the hundred 
little notes of the ivory, the crockery and the enamel work, pale 
with age, which showed against the dull red hangings. 

At Med an, twenty years before the end, Zola foresaw 
such a sudden death as was his eventual fate, and the 
thought of it haunted him. When his mother died it 
was necessary to bring the coffin down by way of the 
window, for Medan, despite all its towers, had only a 
winding, narrow staircase. Thereafter Zola was never 
able to look at the window without a torturing wonder 
as to when the time was coming for the next lowering. 
For twenty years a light was kept burning in anticipa- 
tion. But Death, striking him down, chose the day 



154 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

after he left Medan for the autumn of 1902. The 
sudden and tragic end came in an apartment in the 
Rue de Bruxelles. 

Not even in the "Comedie Humaine" of Balzac is 
the topography of Paris so minutely studied, or the 
network of streets and boulevards interwoven so inex- 
tricably into the warp and woof, as in Zola's history of 
the Rougon-Macquart. In setting forth his purpose 
in commencing this Histoire Naturelle et Sociale d'une 
Famille sous le Second Empire Zola wrote of it as fol- 
lows: 

I desire to explain how a single family, a little group of human 
beings, comes into relation with society at large, as it increases by 
begetting and giving birth to ten or twenty individuals, who, though 
at first sight they seem quite dissimilar, when analyzed reveal how 
intimately they are bound together, since heredity has laws as well 
as mathematics. The members of the family Rougon-Macquart, 
the one group that it is my purpose to depict, have as a family trait 
the gnawing of lust, of appetite that leaps to its gratification. His- 
torically they are part of the people; they make themselves felt by 
contemporary society; they rise to see spheres of life by that char- 
acteristically modern impulse which the lower classes feel; and they 
thus explain the Second Empire by their individual histories. 

When, in 1878, "Un Page d'Amour," the ninth vol- 
ume of the Rougon-Macquart, appeared, Zola published 
with it his first draft of the family tree, together with 
the statement that he left it just as it was drawn up 
before a Hne of "La Fortune des Rougon," the opening 
story, was written. An enlarged and amplified tree 
which appeared with "Le Docteur Pascal," the closing 




ISS 



156 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

volume of the series, proved that the original scheme 
had been adhered to throughout. Of course when Zola 
undertook his task there was nothing to warn him of the 
imminence of the Franco-Prussian War and the Com- 
mune, which afterward afforded him the dramatic 
climax for "La Debacle." But he himself felt that 
these incidents cost him more than he gained, by dis- 
arranging his plans and hastening the denouement of 
certain novels, notably that of "Nana," whose heroine 
he was forced to kill off at least ten years before he 
had intended. 

Recalling Zola's own early life in the Rue Saint- 
Victor, the Rue Soufflot, and the Rue Monsieur le Prince, 
his comparative neglect of the section of the Luxem- 
bourg, the University, the Latin Quarter — in fact, the 
whole region lying south of the Seine — is somewhat sur- 
prising. His natural life brought him little in contact 
with Montmartre, yet the sacred "butte" figures in 

his novels more than 
any other of the fau- 
bourgsof Paris. It 
was in Montmartre 
that Mme. Mechain, 
the blackmailer of 
"L'Argent," collected 
rents from the laby- 
rinth of filthy hovels 
known as the "City of 
Naples." It was to Montmartre that Claude Lantier 
turned from the Rue Douai in search of the new studio, 
which he found back of the cemetery, in the Rue Tour- 




THE CABARET OF THE ASSASSINS. AN 
OUTPOST OF THE "CITY OF NAPLES." ZOLA's 

"l'argent." 



ZOLA'S PARIS 



157 



laque, an old, tumble-down, abandoned tannery that 
let In the sun and rain through gaping cracks. Above 
all, Montmartre dominated the last volume of the Three 
Cities trilogy. It was the vantage point from which 
Pierre Froment, the sceptical young priest, studied the 
vast city before him: Paris, personified and capricious, 
changing her mood 
with every hour of the 
day; ** Paris of mys- 
tery, shrouded by 
clouds, buried beneath 
the ashes of some 
disaster"; "a limpid, 
lightsome Paris be- 
neath the pink glow of 
a spring-like evening"; 
"Paris lying stretched 
out like a lizard in the 
sun"; "Paris, which 
the divine sun had sown 
with light, and where 
in glory waved the 
great future harvest of 
Truth and Justice." 

But in the main the Paris of the Rougon-Macquart 
was the heart of the modern city, the quarters lying 
within half a mile of the Bank of France. In that 
region is the Bourse, personified in "L'Argent"; the 
Halles Centrales, of "Le Ventre de Paris"; the great 
stretches most affected by the Haussmannising under 
the Second Empire that was the very hfe blood of "La 




APPROACHING THE BASILIQUE I>U 
SACRE-CCEUR 



158 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Curee"; the stair-cases and landings of "Pot-Bouille"; 
the department stores of Au Bonheur des Dames; 
and, among the many scenes of "Nana," the Grand 
Hotel in the Boulevard des Capucines where the courte- 
san was stretched on her death bed as the maddened 
crowds below were shouting "A Berlin! A Berlin! 
A Berlin!" Incidentally, as an indication of the ex- 
treme care with which Zola worked it is told that in 
preparation for the scene last mentioned he employed 
a friend to obtain precise information about the aspect 
of those rooms on the top floor of the Grand Hotel and 
the view from them. 

A favourite haunt of Saccard pere and Saccard fils 
of "La Curee" was the Cafe Anglais in the Boulevard 
des Italiens. That estabhshment closed its doors 
in April, 1913. In the days of the Second Empire other 
men than adventurers like the Saccards frequented it. 
It was a kind of a literary club, and there Mery, Jules 
Janin, Alphonse Karr, and Theophile Gautier sat side 
by side. The elder Dumas divided his time on the 
boulevards between the Cafe Anglais and the old 
Maison Doree, and at a table in the former was in the 
habit of sitting down to write his daily contribution 
to the Mousquetaire. It was in the near-by Rue 
Basse du Renfort that Renee, in "La Curee," forced 
Maxime to take her to a ball given by the demi- 
mondaine Blanche Miiller; and the evening, with its in- 
famous sequel, ended in the white- and gold-chamber 
of the Cafe Riche, "furnished with the coquetries of a 
boudoir, " with its atmosphere of stale passions, its tell- 
tale record of scratched names. 



ZOLA'S PARIS 159 

The Boulevard des Italiens, perhaps the most famous 
stretch of the arc extending from the Madeleine to the 
Bastille, took its name from the old Theatre des It- 
aliens, which has been replaced by the Opera Comique. 
In the old theatre Renee and Maxime saw Ristori in 
"Phedre," a play fraught with tragic significance to 
them. Passing from the Boulevard des ItaHens to 
the Boulevard Montmartre, we find, on the south side, 
the covered Passage des Panoramas, next to the Theatre 
des Varietes. There Count Muffat used to wait for 
Nana to come from the theatre, and, in "L'Argent," 
Saccard caught Mme. Conin coming from a rendez- 
vous. The Passage des Panoramas leads in the direc- 
tion of the Bourse, and in the neighbouring streets 
passed the whole drama of **L'Argent," involving the 
Banque Universelle, the cold-blooded scheming of the 
Jew, Gundermann, who "triumphed because he had no 
passions," and the final downfall of Saccard and his 
visions of financial conquest. The Universelle was in 
reality the Union Generate, which had been founded as 
a great Christian bank, blessed by Pope Leo XIII, 
and, a few years before Zola began the writing of the 
tale, smashed by Lebaudy, the Sugar King, whose 
eccentric son achieved world-wide notoriety first as 
**Le Petit Sucrier," and later as the ''Emperor of the 
Sahara." Of all his books before "La Debacle," Zola 
found "L'Argent" the most difficult to write. He had 
among his friends no financiers, he had never gambled 
on the Bourse, and he lacked information regarding the 
inner working of what the French call the haute banque. 
Months of first-hand study of the Bourse and the sur- 



i6o THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

rounding streets were needed to overcome these dis- 
advantages. 

From the Bourse continue to the near-by Place des 
Victoires, with its equestrian statue of Louis XIV, 
for the atmosphere of another book of the Rougon- 
Macquart. Through the Place the wedding party in 
"L'Assommoir" passed on the way to the Louvre. 
Beneath the statue there was a stop while Gervaise 
re-tied the lacing of her shoe. Retracing the route 
by which the party came, along the Rue du Mail and 
the Rue de Clery, and then striking in a northwesterly 
direction, one reaches the heart of the land of "L'As- 
sommoir," the Boulevard de Rochechouart, which in 
those days was the region of abattoirs. There, in a 
shabby little hotel, Lantier deserted Gervaise and the 
two boys; there Coupeau met her, married her, and 
they lived happily until the accident that so changed 
the current of Coupeau's life. Near-by, in the Boule- 
vard de la Chapelle, was the Moulin d'Argent, where 
the wedding party had their pique-nique d cent sous 
par tete, and paralleling the boulevard to the north is 
the Rue de la Goutte d'Or, where Nana was born and 
where Coupeau was carried after his fall from the roof 
in the Rue de la Nation. In writing "L'Assommoir," 
which was the book that raised him to fame, Zola was 
for a long time at a loss for an intrigue that would prop- 
erly weld the chief scenes of the story together. The 
idea of taking a girl of the people, who falls and bears 
her seducer two children, and then marries another man, 
establishes herself in profitable business by hard work 
bu.t is borne down by the conduct of her husband who 



ZOLA'S PARIS i6i 

becomes a drunkard, had, previously occurred to him, 
figuring indeed in the original geneological tree which 
he had dra^vn up for the Rougon-Macquart, but he felt 
that the husband's drunkenness might not fully account 
for the wife's downfall, and he remained at a loss ^ow to 
continue until, all at once, there flashed to his mind 
the solution. By bringing the woman's original se- 
ducer back into her home everything would be made 
possible. 

Crowded with associations of the Rougon-Macquart 
5s the Rue de Rivoli. There was Saccard's first home 
after his marriage with Renee. There his confederate, 
Larsonneau, established his office, removing from the 
old haunt in the Latin Quarter, after their first real- 
estate stroke involving the property in the Rue de la 
Pepiniere. At the corner of the Rue de I'Oratoire, a 
shortstreet running diagonally back to the Rue Saint- 
Honore, was the house in which Mme. Josserand, in 
*'Pot-Bouille," spent the evening with her two daugh- 
ters, and then, raging at the failure of her matrimonial 
schemes, made them return home on foot in the pouring 
rain. The zig-zag nature of the journey is explained 
by the fact that there was then no spacious Avenue de 
rOpera leading from the Rue de Rivoli to the great 
boulevards. The Rue d'Alger is the next paralleHng 
thoroughfare to the east of the Rue Castiglione. At the 
corner of that street and the Rue de Rivoli, fronting the 
Tuileries Gardens, was the apartment of Mme. Des- 
farges, one of the clients of au Bonheur des Dames. 
There Octave Mouret went to consult Baron Hartmann, 
who was supposed to pay the running expenses of the 



i62 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

establishment, about the opening of a new avenue — 
called **Dix Decembre" in the story: probably the Rue 
Quatre Septembre of subsequent reality — with a view 
to obtaining an advantageous frontage for his depart- 
ment store. The name Hartmann is strikingly sug- 
gestive of the personage who was such a factor in the 
making of the new Paris. Before sitting down to 
write "Au Bonheur des Dames" Zola had made an 
exhaustive study of the daily lives of the workers in 
such huge Paris drapery establishments as the Bon 
Marche, the Louvre, and the Printemps. 



XI. THE PARIS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT 

The Real Bel- A mi — The Key to the Characters — Maupassant's 
Heritage and Training — The Years of Achievement — The Day's 
Work — The Valets Frangois — The Gathering Shadows — The 
Downfall. 

UNTIL a few years ago at least, a conspicuous 
figure in the afternoon parade along the Avenue 
des Champs-filysees out to the Bois de Boulogne 
and back again was a fastidiously dressed man, who, 
from the seat of his victoria, surveyed with eyes that 
were half intolerant, half supercilious the pietons on the 
sidewalks and the occupants of passing horse-drawn 
vehicles. Toward the stream of motor-cars that year 
by year grew in volume his glances were of almost 
malignant hostility. The mechanical vehicle he held 
to be an intrusion, and the plaything of the vulgar. But 
the steeds that conveyed him to and fro were of the 
finest breed and the last word in grooming; and to the 
end liis attitude toward the world was the attitude 
affected by the penniless young clerk in a railway office, 
who, one evening, met the journalist Forestier in the 
Boulevard des Italiens, and gladly accepted the loan 
of two louis which he never repaid. For the man 
was the original of George Duroy, later Du Roy de 
Cantel, of Guy de Maupassant's "Bel-Ami." 

i6% 



i64 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

There is said to exist a set of Maupassant's books 
on the margins of which he jotted down the real names 
of every person and place he described. Even further 
than Alphonse Daudet he carried this passion for per- 
sonalities. The George Duroy of "Bel-Ami" has been 
mentioned. The real Boule-de-Suif was one Adrienne 
Legay, who lived in Rouen at the time of the War of 
1870, and who died in poverty about two years after 
Maupassant himself passed away in the maison de sante 
of Doctor Blanche. The heroine of "Une Vie" is said 
to have been drawn from his own mother, as Dickens 
put his mother in Mrs Nickleby, and Thackeray drew 
upon his — together with his wife and Mrs Brookfield^ 
in the making of Amelia Sedley. It was about a year 
ago that a line from Paris told of the death of the man 
whom Maupassant invested with the complicated 
qualities of Olivier Bertin in "Fort Comme la Mort." 
The Madame de Burne of "Notre Coeur" is supposed 
to have been the mysterious lady — the "lady of the 
pearl-grey dress" — whose repeated visits to Maupas- 
sant, in the last years at Cannes, so distressed the valet, 
Francois. The originals of the Comtesse de Guillery, of 
Forestier and Madame Forestier, later Madame Du Roy 
de Cantel, of Clotilde, and of Monsieur and Madame 
Walter of "Bel-Ami" were perfectly well known to a 
score of Maupassant's personal friends. The chapters 
describing modern Parisian journalism were based upon 
his own experiences in the offices of certain paperS;, 
notably the Gaulois. 

For all practical purposes the Paris upon which Guy 
de Maupassant drew so freely in the course of his six 




IN THE PARC MONCtAU 



THE PARIS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT 165 

novels, his fifteen or twenty stones that range from 
twelve to twenty-five thousand words, and his in- 
numerable contes, is the Paris of to-day, or, at least, the 
Paris that we knew prior to the ist of August, 1914. 
It is the city of pleasure and industry that is reflected 
in his pages — the great 
sweep of the boule- 
vards, the offices ot 
bureaucracy, the hives 
of journalism, the 
bowered driveways of 
the Bois, or the Rond- 
Point glinting in the 
afternoon sunshine, the 
humming activity of 

the great shops of fashion that line the Rue de la Paix 
and the Avenue de 1' Opera. But here and there a park 
plays its inevitable part, for when the warp of the story 
did not permit the author to carry his characters away, 
following his own inclination, to the waters of the Seine 
at Bougival or Malmaison, or to the Foret de Fontaine- 
bleau, that love of the country that was in his blood 
turned him to the Pare Monceau, or the Gardens of the 
Luxembourg, or the Buttes-Chaumont, or the Ceme- 
tery of Montmartre or the Cemetery of Pere Lachaise. 
Among Maupassant's novels there is one that is 
blatant of modern Paris. There is Paris in "Fort 
Comme la Mort," in "Notre Coeur"; touches of it even 
in "Une Vie," "Mont Oriol," and "Pierre et Jean." 
But in these books the scenes are merely incidental; a 
home had to be found for Madame de Burne, Andre 



i66 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Mariolle, or Olivier Bertin — a background for this 
encounter, for that prearranged meeting. But the 
sweep of the city, its vastness, its complexity, its cruel 
energy, its pitiless struggle, throb in every page of "Bel- 
Ami." The book begins in the Rue Notre Dame de 
Lorette; it ends in the Madeleine. That tells a signi- 
ficant story. 

From the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, George 
Duroy — ex-trooper in Algeria, now a clerk in a railway 
office on a salary that barely permits him to exist — 
strolls of an evening down to the boulevards to watch 
enviously those more favoured of fortune taking their 
amusement. Crossing the Place de I'Opera, he meets 
Forestier, a comrade of the former days in the service, 
and the encounter changes his entire life. The forty 
francs that the journalist thrusts in his hand lead to an 
adventure that night at the Folies-Bergere. The fol- 
lowing evening he dines with the Forestiers and their 
guests in the Rue Fontaine. Given a footing as a re- 
porter on the Vie Frangaise, he soon acquires in inti- 
mate knowledge of that surface scum Paris which, to 
the eyes of the stranger, obscures the clearer waters 
below. The soul of the city he never probes; but with 
its body and the sores of its body he is soon as familiar 
as any glazed-hat driver of a night fiacre. 

In the later years of his life in Paris Maupassant 
lived in the Rue Montchanin, a little street to the north 
of the Pare Monceau, near where the Avenue Villiers 
crosses the Boulevard Malesherbes. His was not the 
feverish physical activity of Balzac that sent the creator 
of the "Comedie Humaine" to every corner of Paris 



THE PARIS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT 167 

before selecting the edifice that was to serve as the 
setting for a projected tale. It was easier and it saved 
time to describe structures nearer at hand; so almost 
within a stone's throw of the house in the Rue Mont- 
chanin will be found the streets associated with more 
than half of the Maupassant tales. They lie along the 
line of what are generally known as the Boulevards 
Exterieurs: the Boulevard de Courcelles, the Boulevard 
des Batignolles, the Boulevard de Clichy, and the 
Boulevard Rochechouart. 

To understand Guy de Maupassant's attitude toward 
Paris it is necessary to consider his life in general, his 
heritage, his training, and his environment. He was 
born August 5, 1850, in the Chateau de Miromesnil, 
about eight miles from Dieppe on the Norman coast. 
Breathing deeply in his cradle of the salt of the sea, to 
the end of his days ever turning to its imperious call, 
there was always, in his bearing toward Paris, something 
of the hostility of the stranger. Maupassant's father, 
Gustave de Maupassant, belonged to a Lorraine family 
that had established itself in Normandy nearly a hun- 
dred years before the birth of the novelist. The family 
had been ennobled by the Emperor Francis — in fact, 
had the right to carry the title of marquis. Upon this 
right, Guy, even in the years when he was most assidu- 
ously courting Parisian society, never traded. In that 
respect he was no "Bel-Ami." In 1846 Gustave de 
Maupassant espoused Mile. Laure Le Poittevain, of 
a family of the upper Norman bourgeoisie. As chil- 
dren, Laure and her brother Alfred had been com- 
rades of Gustave Flaubert, a fact which may be ac- 



i68 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

cepted as explaining the ardour with which in after years 
the author of "Madame Bovary" devoted himself to 
Guy's literary training. 

The marriage of Guy's parents did not turn out hap- 
pily, and soon after the birth of a second son — Herve, 
six years younger than Guy — an amicable separation 
was arranged, by the terms of which Madame de Mau- 
passant took back her own fortune, retained the chil- 
dren, and, for their support, received from her husband 
the sum of sixteen hundred francs a year. She made 
her home in Etretat, between Havre and Fecamp on 
the Norman coast, and it was there that the boys passed 
the greater part of their childhood. Until he was thir- 
teen Guy's education was of an exceedingly desultory 
nature, with his mother practically his only instructor. 
When he entered the seminary at Yvetot he found the 
discipHne and the society of his commonplace school- 
mates in unhappy contrast to the free hfe by the sea. 

Then came the Lycee, in Rouen. There he was hap- 
pier, and he worked diligently, winning his degree 
without trouble. He had already decided upon a 
literary career, and, as has been so usual with French 
men of letters, he began by writing verse. At that 
period of his life he seems to have been a creature of 
great gayety and abounding animal spirits. That 
splendid physical strength, which, outwardly at least, 
he always retained, and which enabled him as a swim- 
mer to buffet the waves for hours at a time — he once 
rescued Swinburne when the English poet was drowning 
— had, of course, not been impaired by excess or over- 
work. There are many anecdotes of that time that 



THE PARIS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT 169 

explain the formation of the writer, and particularly 
his methods of observation. An English maiden lady 
on whom the high-spirited youth played a practical 
joke later served as the model for "Miss Harriet." 
All that he owed to Normandy, to the peasants, the 
sailors, the country priests, the keepers of taverns — 
all the vivid impressions that were to play so prominent 
a part in his Hfe work — were then assimilated. Then, 
in the spring after the War of 1870, when he was in his 
twenty-first year, he went to Paris. He obtained a 
clerkship in the Department of Marine that paid him a 
yearly salary of fifteen hundred francs. Later he found 
a more lucrative place in the Department of Public In- 
struction. As an employee of the State he was by no 
means overzealous. His leisure hours he devoted to 
boating on the Seine; at the office he scribbled on the 
paper of the administration the verses and essays that 
on Sundays he submitted to Flaubert's criticism. 

That criticism, supervision, and direction lasted for 
seven years — from 1873 till 1880. It consisted of de- 
veloping the powers of observation, of impressing upon 
the youth the older man's arduous creed of style, of 
curbing with a firm hand the natural desire for prema- 
ture publication. At the Sunday Flaubert table young 
Maupassant was a frequent guest. There he met on 
terms of easy equality the leading men of letters of 
France: Edmond de Goncourt, Zola, Alphonse Daudet, 
Catulle Mendes, Turgenieff, and others. The ap- 
prenticeship came to an end in 1878 when *'Boule-de- 
Suif" was included in the "Soirees de Medan." 

Admirable as it unquestionably is as a story, "Boule- 



I70 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

de-Suif" was essentially a tour de force. The more 
natural expression of Maupassant's talent was in the 
interpretation of the bureaucratic life about him, and 
of those Parisian scenes and streets with which his 
daily activities as an employee brought him in contact. 
The story of Maupassant's life from 1880 to 1890 is 
the story of his books. In the ten years he produced 
six novels, sixteen volumes of short stories, three vol- 
umes of travel, besides numerous newspaper articles 
that have not been included in the various editions of 
his works. His average was rather more than three 
books a year, a result that he achieved by the regularity 
of his work. He wrote every morning from seven 
o'clock till noon, turning out at least six pages a day. 
Flaubert, his master, revised and revised, sometimes 
spending days over a single sentence, groping furiously 
for hours in the pursuit of the exact word. Maupassant, 
as fastidious as Flaubert in the matter of style, found 
expression so easy that he rarely erased. It was his 
habit, contrary to general opinion, to make a prelimi- 
nary draft of a story. According to one of his friends 
he never went to bed without jotting down notes of 
all that had impressed him during the day. Precision 
in the matter of minute details was his creed. For 
example, in "La Maison Tellier," over which he toiled 
for months, there is a scene introducing English and 
French sailors. Being entirely ignorant of the English 
language he went to Turgenieff in order to inform 
himself exactly as to the words of "Rule Britannia.** 
Where it was a case of a Paris street or structure he 
was equally precise. In "L'Heritage," that sinister 



i 



THE PARIS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT 171 

tale of a conditional Inheritance, the information that 
the stor}"" conveys is that M. Cachelin lived in the upper 
end of the Rue Rochechouart, a street that may roughly 
be described as being not very far from the Gare du 
Nord. It is related that Maupassant made a careful 
study of every house of that street near its Boulevard- 
Rochechouart end, until he found the one structure 
that fitted the purposes of his narrative. The little 
apartment in the Rue de Constantinople, just back of 
the Gare Saint-Lazare, where, in "Bel-Ami," Mme, 
de Marelle and George Duroy had their meetings, is 
said to have been drawn from an apartment associated 
with certain episodes in the author's own life as a man 
of gallantry. There was perhaps a generality in placing 
the office of La Vie Frangaise, where Duroy won his 
spurs in joumaHsm, in the Boulevard Poissonniere; 
for locating a Parisian newspaper in that neighbourhood 
was something like ascribing the office of a New York 
daily to Park Row, or a London daily to Fleet Street. 
In its sweep, "Bel-Ami," more than any other novel 
of Maupassant, is compact of modern Paris. The 
very essence of the evening life of the great boulevard, 
with its sidewalk tables and its flaneurs ^ is in the open- 
ing scene, culminating with Duroy's encounter with 
his comrade of the Algerian army days, Forestier. 
In turn the narrative shifts to the Folies-Bergere, to 
the home of the Forestiers, No. 17 Rue Fontaine, to 
that of the Marelles, to Duroy's own miserable dwelling, 
to the Bois, to the church into which the adventurer 
pursued Mme. Walter, to various restaurants and 
artists' studios, and finally to the stately Madeleine, 



172 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

where, with ecclesiastical blessing and admonition, 
George Du Roy de Cantel and Suzanne Walter were 
made man and wife. 

The Paris of "Bel-Ami" is essentially the Paris of 
"Notre Coeur," of "Fort Comme la Mort," of "Mon- 
sieur Parent," of "L' Inutile Beaute," and "L'Herit- 
age." It was touched in "Pierre et Jean," "Mont 
Oriol," and "Une Vie." But it was inevitable that 
the continual change and travel that were such factors 
in Maupassant's own life after his first taste of success 
should have been reflected in the most Parisian of his 
novels. Two journeys, one to Cannes and the other to 
Rouen, play parts in "Bel-Ami." The Norman Mont 
Saint-Michel and the Forest of Fontainebleau are woven 
into "Notre Cceur." In his books, as in his own exist- 
ence, Maupassant needed a diversion from the feverish 
turmoil of Paris. If he himself could spare time for 
summer weeks between the jalaises of Etretat, for 
cruises in Mediterranean waters, for. voyages to Italy, 
Corsica, Sicily, and Algeria, he felt that his characters 
were entitled to a similar privilege. Then too, despite 
a certain undeniable vein of snobbishness, which led him 
to 'profess a preference for the company of men and 
women of society over that of his fellow literary 
workers, Maupassant's liking for the gra7id monde was 
never thoroughly genuine. He became a man of 
fashion; he was sought after and welcomed in the 
most exclusive circles; to his talent even the doors of 
the old nobility were opened; yet his attitude was ever 
one of cold politeness and affected disdain. 

The formal Maupassant biography is that of Maynial. 



i 



THE PARIS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT 173 

But six or seven years ago there appeared the " Recol- 
lections of Maupassant's valet." Major Arthur Pen- 
dennis's man-servant, Morgan, taking leave of his 
rnaster in some dissatisfaction, debated whether he 
should go in for literature or politics. Had he chosen 
the former career, and become the historian of the grim 
old warrior he knew so well, the result might have been 
a book much in the vein of Fran9ois's book. For to 
the valet the master was above all a dandy and an ac- 
complished man of the world. It was very fine, per- 
haps, to have written "Bel-Ami," and "Fort Comme 
la Mort," and "Pierre et Jean." But what really 
stirred the pride of Francois, and made him assume 
airs over other gentlemen's gentlemen, was the position 
of Maupassant as a boulevardier, his friendships with 
aristocratic names, his successes with women. Yet 
now and then Francois condescends to throw light on 
Maupassant the craftsman. For example, the pub- 
lication of "Fort Comme la Mort" in March, 1889, 
was a triumph for Maupassant, but brought him so 
many visits from young writers that he began to com- 
plain. Francois quotes him: 

They tire me to death. I wzfnt the mornings for my work, and 
really they are becoming too numerous. Henceforth I will receive 
them only by appointment. Of course I like to be of use to them; 
but very often what I tell them does no good. Now that young 
fellow who has just left me; it is a waste of time to give him good 
advice: he is so dissipated. He never thmks about his work, and 
yet imagines he will become a novel writer! It is impossible, im- 
possible! You understand, in order to write a novel, you must 
think of it constantly, all the characters must be in their proper 



174 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

places, everything must be settled before you begin writing the first 
pages, otherwise you must begin every day all over again. Then 
there is a muddle from which you can never come out successfully. 
It is not the work of one day, even for a practised writer, let alone a 
beginner. 

Francois himself had some opinions on literary 
matters. An excursion into the environs once led 
master and man in the direction of Zola's house at 
Medan. Francois, in response to a question, acknowl- 
edged acquaintance with the " Rougon-Macquart " 
series, and added: 

Since you really wish to know what I think of the books I will tell 
you. M. Zola exaggerates terribly when talking about servants. 
He puts all sorts of horrors in the mouths of the maids; in "Pot- 
Bouille" he makes them scream the nastiest expressions out of the 
courtyard windows. I repeat, sir, all this is exaggerated. Twenty- 
five years have I been a servant, and I have never heard speeches 
bordering in any way on those M. Zola puts in the mouths of his 
characters. M. Zola sought his documents on the very lowest rung 
of the ladder. I wonder where he got them. It is not fair to attack 
defenceless beings, who are very often interesting. How many 
times during a day does a poor maid-servant trample on her own 
self-respect so as to keep her place and remain an honest girl! And 
that, so as at the end of the month, she may pocket thirty francs, out 
of which she buys what she cannot do without, sending the rest to 
her old father and mother, who still are obliged to support young 
children, and are often helpless on account of their infirmities. 

Francois was with Maupassant during the last, 
tragic years. The trouble with the novelist's eyes, 
which so often interfered with his work, began as early 
as 1885. To repair excesses, and to soften suffering 



PARIS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT 175 

he indulged in ether, cocaine, morphine, and hasheesh. 
The impending crash was foreshadowed in such tales 
as "Le Horla," "Lui," "Fou," and "Qui Sait." The 
story of the actual breakdown has never been made 
quite clear, Francois hintingly attributed it to the 
"lady of the pearl-grey dress and golden waistband," 
and to a mysterious telegram from an eastern land. 
There was a journey to the Ile-Sainte-Marguerite 
during which some weird and horrible thing happened. 
But what it was no one seems to know. A week later, 
at Cannes, Maupassant made two attempts at suicide. 
Then he had the delusion that war had been declared 
between France and Germany. He was feverishly 
eager to go to the front and made Francois swear to 
follow him to the defense of the eastern frontier. 
"During our numerous journeys," recorded Francois, 
"he always gave me his military certificate to take care 
of, for fear this should be lost in the enormous quantities 
of papers he possessed." 

Then again, and for the last time, Paris, or rather the 
outskirts of Paris; the maison de sante of Doctor Blanche 
at Passy, where he was to remain till the end. They 
are not pleasant to contemplate, those last days. 
There were periods of gibbering and violence. He 
imagined countless invisible enemies. Even against 
the faithful Fran9ois he turned, accusing him of having 
taken his place on the Figaro^ and slandered him 
in heaven. "I beg you to leave me; I refuse to see 
you any more." In a savage moment he hurled a bil- 
Hard ball at the head of another inmate. Again his 
madness would take the form of belief in his own Monte- 



176 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Cristo-like wealth — the folie des grandeurs — when he 
would rush about calling to an imaginary broker to sell 
the French rentes, en bloc. 

Now and then there was an hour of lucidity, of calm- 
ness, of comparative peace, when he was able to recog- 
nize friends, when, looking out of his window, he would 
see the glittering lights of the city, and imagine the 
Madame de Burnes, the Madame de Marelles, the Olivier 
Bertins, the George Duroys, going about their business 
and their pleasure as usual. Perhaps he recalled the 
days of his lusty strength, when he had ever been so 
ready to faire la noce. But sparkling as had been the 
wit, loud as had been the laughter, there was always 
the undertone of bitter, weary sadness. Often his 
heart had leaped to fugitive joys, to the dehghts of the 
palate, to the glamour of woman's beauty, to the 
spectacle of snow-capped mountain peaks, to the surge 
and roar of the sea. But ever in that heart there was 
a deep cavern, locked tight against the world, and in 
that cavern there was gloom, infinite gloom, the gloom 
of a man alone, always alone, and gnashing in the 
darkness. 



XII. THE PARIS OF SOME AMERICANS 

Irving and Cooper — Poe's "Mystery of Marie Roget," "The 
Purloined Letter," and " The Murders in the Rue Morgue" — A 
Digression — Paris in the Books of Archibald Clavering Gunter — 
Marion Crawford and W. D. Howells — Mark Twain — Henry 
James — Edith Wharton — Richard Harding Davis — Owen John- 
son — Robert W. Chambers — H. L. Wilson s " Ruggles of Red 
Gap" — Booth Tarkingtons "The Guest of Quesnay," "The 
Beautiful Lady," and "His Own People" — Vance, Moffett, 
and others — Frank Norris — An 0. Henry Paris Trail. 

WASHINGTON IRVING knew his Paris well, 
living there about the time that Victor Hugo, 
and Honore de Balzac, and the elder Dumas, 
and Eugene Sue were producing fiction industriously. 
In Paris Irving met John Howard Payne, who wrote 
"Home, Sweet Home" and the two worked together, 
in the Rue Richelieu, adapting French plays to English 
representation. Although he did not turn it to use 
in fiction we have occasional glimpses of Paris in the 
pages of the Irving; glimpses in that vein of pleasant 
half fiction which seems to have been his favourite 
method of expression. Above all, he delighted in con- 
trasting English and French as he found them there, 
in holding the city at arm's length as a background 
against which to study and satirize amiably British 
foibles and temperament. Who can forget the choleric 

177 




178 



Key to Map on Page lyS 

A Map Indicating the Invasion of France by Certain English and 
American Works of Fiction; Key, Paris and Environs. I. The 
Newcomes (Thackeray); 2. Adventures of Philip (Thackeray); 
3. Vanity Fair (Thackeray); 4. Paris Sketch Book (Thackeray); 
5. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens); 6. The Parisians (Bulwer); 
7. Richelieu (G. P. R. James); 8. A Sentimental Journey (Sterne); 
9. The Wrecker (Stevenson); 10. A Lodging for the Night (Steven- 
son); II. New Arabian Nights (Stevenson); 12. Trilby (Du 
Maurier); 13. Peter Ibbetson (Du Maurier); 16. The Martian (Du 
Maurier); 15. The Refugees (Doyle); 16. 17. Exploits, and Ad- 
ventures of Gerard (Doyle); 18. The Beloved Vagabond (Locke); 
19. Septimus (Locke); 20. Simon the Jester (Locke); 21. The Old 
Wives' Tale (Bennett); 22. If I Were King (McCarthy); 23. A 
Chair on the Boulevard (Merrick); 24, While Paris Laughed (Mer- 
rick); 25. Mystery of Marie Roget (Poe); 26. Murders in the Rue 
Morgue (Poe); 27. The Purloined Letter (Poe); 28. Adventurfes of 
Franfois (Mitchell); 29. The Princess Aline (Davis); 30. In the 
Name of Liberty (Johnson); 31. In the Quarter (Chambers); 32. 
The Red Republic (Chambers); 33. Ruggles of Red Gap (Wilson); 
34. The Honey Bee (Merwin); 35. The Lone Wolf (Vance); 36. 
Zut (Carryll); 37. The Guest of Quesnay (Tarkington); 38. The 
Beautiful Lady (Tarkington); 39. Madame de Treymes (Wharton); 
40. The American (James); 41. The Scarlet Pimpernel (Orczy); 
42. The Elusive Pimpernel (Orczy); 43. Mr. Barnes of New York 
(Gunter); 44. Mr. Potter of Texas (Gunter); 45. That Frenchman 
(Gunter); 46. The Wooing o't (Alexander); 47. Confessions of a 
Young Man (Moore); 48. The Helmet of Navarre (Runkle); 49. 
The Drums of War (Stackpoole); 50.' At Odds with the Regent 
(Stevenson). 

178a 



Key to Map — Continued 

About Rural France. 51. The Newcomes (Thackeray); 52. 
Uncle Bernac (Doyle); 53. The Village on the ClifF (Ritchie); 
54. The Four Meetings (James); 55. The Guest of Quesnay (Tark- 
ington); 56. Moths (Ouida); 57. The Battle of the Strong (Parker); 
58. Conrad in Quest of His Youth (Merrick); 59. Quentin Durward 
(Scott); 60. The Lightning Conductor (Williamson); 61. Anne of 
Troboul (Van Saanen); 62. Guenn (Howard); 63. The Castle of 
Twilight (Potter); 64. The Leopard and the Lady (Bowen); 65. 
Sire de Maletrolt's Door (Stevenson); 66. La Vendee (TroUope); 
67. The Heart's Key (Hewlett); 68. Aristide Pujol (Locke); 
69. The House of the Wolf (Weyman); 70. Under the Red Robe 
(Weyman); 71. Sir Nigel (Doyle); 72. The White Company (Doyle) J 
73. Cardillac (Barr); 74. In His Name (Hale); 75. Perpetua 
(Baring-Gould); 76. Captain Macklin (Davis); 77. The Consul 
CDavis);78. Daisy Miller (James); 79. The Arrow of Gold (Conrad); 
80. The Garden of Allah (Hichens); 81. Little Dorrit (Dickens); 
82. The Destroyer (Stevenson); 83. Septimus (Locke); 84. Mr. 
Barnes of New York (Gunter); 85. The Brigand (James); 86. The 
Golden Hawk (Rickert); 87. There Were Nmety and Nine (Davis); 
88. A Romance of the Nineteenth Century (Mallock); 89. The 
Countess of Picpus (Hewlett); 90. Yolanda (Major); 91. Anne of 
Geierstaein (Scott); 92. Joan of Arc (Twain); 93. Somewhere in 
France (Davis); A Monk of Fife (Lang); 94. The Cloister and the 
Hearth (Reade); 95. The Maids of Paradise (Chambers); 96. The 
False Faces (Vance); 97. The Garden of Swords (Pemberton); 
98. The Virgin Fortress (Pemberton); 99. The Dream of Peace 
(Gribble); 100. The Light That Failed (Kipling). 



[78b 



THE PARIS OF SOME AMERICANS 179 

Briton of his description, furious at the noise made by 
an awkward servant, yet instantly appeased by the 
sly excuse: *'It's this confounded French lock, sir." 
Cooper was in Paris in approximately the same years 
that Irving was, and, incidentally, then laid the founda- 
tions of his French fame, which has endured, unim- 
paired, to the present time, possibly for the reason 
that the French, reading him in translation, have been 
spared the atrocities of his style. There is no more a 
Paris of Fenimore Cooper than there is a Paris of 
Washington Irving. 

Edgar Allan Poe, unless the present Pilgrim be griev- 
ously in error, never saw Lutetia; never was nearer to 
it than in his youthful days in the English school at 
Stoke-Newington; yet there is a very definite Paris 
that is the background of "The Purloined Letter," 
*'The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Mystery 
of Marie Roget." Nor in this is there anything aston- 
ishing. In "Rip Van Winkle" Irving builded so well 
that his claim to the region with which the story deals 
is likely to last as long as American literature lasts. 
Yet "Rip Van Winkle" was written in London, at a 
time when Irving had never been in the Catskill Moun- 
tains; never listened to the thunder there which still 
suggests the gnome-like figures of the ancient Dutch 
navigators silently playing bowls, and the bibulous 
Rip sinking to his twenty years' slumber. 

As everyone knows, "The Mystery of Marie Roget" 
was based on the murder, in 1842, of Mary Cecilia 
Rogers, the beautiful cigar girl of the John Anderson 
shop at the corner of Broadway and Duane Street. 



i8o THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

New York, whose body was found floating in the 
Hudson River near what was once known as the Sybil's 
Cave at Weehawken. It was the cause celehre of the 
time, and Poe, in common with almost everyone else 
in New York — or rather in the country at large, for Poe 
was not at the time living in New York — had a theory 
as to the method and the perpetrators of the crime. 
So in the story, under pretence of a Parisian grisette, 
employed in a perfumery shop in the Palais Royal, the 
author followed, in minute detail, the essential, while 
merely paralleling the unessential, facts of the real 
murder of Mary Rogers, Thus Nassau Street became 
the Rue Pavee Saint-Andre; John Anderson, Monsieur 
Leblanc; the Hudson, the Seine; Weehawken, the 
Barriere du Roule; and the New York Brother JonathaUy 
the New York Journal of Commerce, and the Philadelphia 
Saturday Evening Post, "a weekly paper," respectively, 
UEtoile, le Commerciel, and Le Soleil. 

There is not, and it may be said with probable safety, 
any such street in Paris as the Rue Morgue, the scene 
of the strange and terrible murders of Madame L'Espan- 
aye and her daughter Camille L'Espanaye. But the 
apartment was in the Quartier Saint-Roch, that familiar 
section of the city which lies within the triangle of which 
the hypotenuse is the Avenue de I'Opera, and the other 
two sides the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue de la Paix 
continued through the Place Vendome and along the 
Rue Castiglione. Dr. John Watson first met Sherlock 
Holmes in a hospital where the latter was engaged in the 
amiable pastime of beating corpses in order to ascertain 
how far wounds might be produced after death. The 



THE PARIS OF SOME AMERICANS i8i 

historian of the deeds of Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, 
of all the sources from which Conan Doyle drew his 
investigator of criminal activities one of the most 
direct, found him in a library in the Rue Montmartre, 
where the two men had gone in search of the same rare 
and remarkable volume. As one encounter resulted 
in Watson and Holmes sharing the now famous apart- 
ment in Upper Baker Street, the other led to a common 
residence in a time-eaten and grotesque mansion totter- 
ing to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the 
Faubourg Saint-Germain. 

And now for a digression and the introduction of a 
name that are perhaps equally unpardonable. The 
Pilgrim first saw Saint-Augustine between two trains. 
In order to make the most of the three hours at disposal 
the services of an Ethiopian charioteer — which Is 
euphemism for Florida coon hack driver — were enlisted. 
"New Carnegie Library, sah," he pointed out and then 
went expectantly asleep on the box. Now Carnegie 
Libraries are In every way estimable Institutions, but 
hardly to be regarded as objects of compelling interest 
In a corner of the new world that still retains something 
of the flavourof old Spain. Jehu's nap did not last long. 
The Pilgrim persisted, stormed, pleaded. Was there 
not a Spanish fort, a slave market, a row of Spanish 
houses.? Again a stop, preliminary to another essay 
at slumber. **New Y. M. C. A. Building, sah. Just 
finished last year." That first hour was wasted; the 
last two were not. They were spent In a wicker chair 
In the court of the Ponce de Leon Hotel reading or 
rather rereading "A Florida Enchantment" by one 



i82 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Archibald Clavering Gunter. It mattered not that the 
plot was absurd; that the style was abominable. The 
spirit of Saint- Augustine was in those pages, just as old 
Edinburgh is in the pages of "The Heart of Midlothian." 
Now there is offered the opening for some highly dis- 
criminating reviewer to point out that the Pilgrim has 
coupled the two books and inferentially proclaimed 
Gunter the peer of Sir Walter. 

There was a time, when the Pilgrim was a very small 
boy, when, crossing the Atlantic on the old Servia or 
Umhria, or by the old Bretagne, Bourgogne, or Nor- 
mandie — the particular vessel is of no importance, the 
point is merely to emphasize the period — one saw, in 
the vacated deck chairs at the lunch hour, five books 
bearing the name of Archibald Clavering Gunter to 
one of all other authors combined. Those were the 
days of the "big four"; to wit: "Mr. Barnes of New 
York," "Mr. Potter of Texas," "Miss Nobody of 
Nowhere," and "That Frenchman," which rightly 
should have been called "M. de Vernay of Paris." 
Everyone read those books ("Mr. Barnes of New York" 
sold into the millions); many realized how bad they 
were, and a few realized how good they were. Other 
volumes from not the same pen, but the pen of the 
same man, followed in profusion, bound in the bright 
yellow paper cover that had become so familiar. But 
of those the less said the better. But recalling the 
"big four"; who is there inclined to challenge a kindly 
word in memory of their author, who reached such 
heights of ephemeral popularity, whose material success 
was for a brief period so great, and who, ruined by a 



THE PARIS OF SOME AMERICANS 183 

magazine for the conduct of which he was utterly un- 
suited, died in poverty, unhonoured and unsung? 

A few years ago an American novelist whose position 
in the world of letters has long been enviable from more 
than one point of view was travelling through the 
Far Western states. While passing a few days in a 
small city of Wyoming he made the acquaintance of a 
gentleman who with Western breeziness was introduced 
to him as "Mr. So-and-So, the foremost criminal lawyer 
of the State of Wyoming.'* Mr. So-and-So had read 
the novelist's books and was finely enthusiastic in his 
hospitality. "You are my guest," he said. "You 
must stay with me a week — a month — a year. Your 
work? Do it here. I'll tell you plots from real life 
that beat Dumas. I'll show you types of which Charles 
Dickens never dreamed. It is the chance of your life. 
Why, man, I can give you the material to write as great 
a novel as 'Mr. Potter of Texas."' That was the way 
that some persons once felt about the now-despised 
books of Archibald Clavering Gunter. 

It was the flavour of an American abroad that Euro- 
peans never quite understood that one found in the 
early books of Gunter just as one found him in a some- 
what different way in the highly polished novels of 
Henry James. Thirty years ago ours was almost an- 
other United States. The period was one of transition. 
In Europe all Americans were supposed to be enor- 
mously rich, and, to put the matter politely, eccentric. 
The Far West in its theatric sense — the Far West of 
Indian outbreaks, of claim jumping, and fortunes made 
overnight — had just ceased to be a reahty. Europeans 



i84 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

were almost as puzzling to us as we were to them. 
Visiting Englishmen in New York were supposed in- 
variably to patronize the Brevoort, just as they did in 
the novels written in the 'seventies. The term "dude" 
had recently come into derisive use; Anglomaniacs 
were being jeered at violently; and people were making 
the most of the lately coined phrase "the four hundred." 
Such apparent trivialities as these must be kept in 
mind by any one who should happen now to take up for 
the first time "Mr. Barnes of New York," or "Mr. 
Potter of Texas." 

There was a Paris in those books, which, though 
abounding in topographical errors and anachronisms, 
was none the less a Paris. Barnes, a seasoned "globe- 
trotter," was at home there, equally in the Salon, or in 
the coulisse of the old Eden Theatre. Potter of Texas 
made his way there, and, the first night of his stay, 
almost precipitated a riot in one of the cafes-chantants 
of the Champs-Elysees, thinking himself cheated as 
the prices of drinks increased every time he changed 
his seat on account of a growing interest in the houris 
on the stage. Travelling southward over the rails of 
the P.-L.-M. one need take no shame in recalling a sim- 
ilar journey made by Barnes in pursuit of the English 
girl by whose charms he had been so suddenly smitten, 
and the devices by which the American starved her 
into accepting his acquaintance. 

Above all, there was the Paris that Gunter pictured 
in "That Frenchman," the Paris of the Second Empire 
that was running its butterfly race toward Sedan. 
The first part of that story revolved about a plot to 



THE PARIS OF SOME AMERICANS 185 

assassinate the Prince Imperial as a means of averting 
the impending war between France and Germany. 
The thread of the intrigue leads along the boulevards; 
into by-streets; to the Palace of the Tuileries; to the 
Jardin d'Acclimation and the beautiful flower girl 
with the dark eyes and the yellow hair; to Passy; to 
the Mabille; where the comical little detective — a type 
of character that under some name or other appeared 
in all the Gunter books of that period — ^joyously danced 
the can-can; to a salle in the Rue Pelletier and the 
splendid battle between the Masked Wrestler of Paris 
and the Man with the Iron Legs; and finally to the bear- 
pit in the Bois de Boulogne where the heir to the 
French throne was to be done to death by means of 
gas fumes. It has been said that Gunter made some 
tremendous blunders in the description of streets and 
buildings. Very Hkely he did. What does it matter? 
Scott's ''Quentin Durward" is none the less an enter- 
taining novel for the reason that the good Bishop of 
Liege, so dramatically murdered at the banquet of the 
Wild Boar of Ardennes, actually met the most peaceful 
and prosaic of deaths. 

It is singular that in the books of F. Marion Crawford, 
of all American story-tellers perhaps the most thoroughly 
cosmopolitan, there was very little of Paris or of France. 
Of a dozen cities he wrote with easy familiarity; for 
example: New York, in "Katherine Lauderdale," "The 
Ralstons," "The Three Fates," and "Marion Darche"; 
Boston, in "An American Politician"; Munich, in "A 
Cigarette Maker's Romance"; Prague, in "The Witch 
of Prague"; Constantinople, in "Paul PatofF" and 



i86 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

"Arethusa"; London, In "The Diva's Ruby"; Madrid, 
in "In the Palace of the King"; Venice, In "Marietta"; 
Rome, In "Saracenesca," "Sant* Ilarlo," "Pietro 
Ghlslerl," "Don Orsino," "Ceclha," and many more. 
But If there Is any book of his In which the characters 
linger more than a brief moment In Paris It has entirely 
escaped the present Pilgrim's memory. The case of 
Marion Crawford Is also the case of William Dean 
Howells, who, passing Paris by, drew upon the impres- 
sions of his years In the American Consular Service 
in Italy for "Indian Summer,"' a tale of Florence, and 
*'A Foregone Conclusion," of which the scenes were 
among the canals and palaces of Venice. 

There Is Paris in the pages of Mark Twain's "The 
Innocents Abroad," If that book is to be regarded In 
the light of fiction; and Henry James has written much 
of Paris, notably in "The American" and "The Am- 
bassadors," and there is the Paris of Edith Wharton's 
"Madame de Treymes"; and the Paris of Basil King's 
"The Inner Shrine"; and the Revolutionary Paris about 
which Weir Mitchell played whimsically In "The Ad- 
ventures of Francois"; and as it Is quite Impossible In 
this rambling pilgrimage to keep always In the same 
key, there Is the city to which Robert Clay, in Richard 
Harding Davis's "Soldiers of Fortune," referred as 
"your Paris and my Paris"; and the Paris of the same 
author's "The Princess Aline," where Mornay Carlton 
stayed at the Hotel Continental and spent the evening 
In front of the Cafe de la Palx, and dined at Laurent's 
in the Champs-Elysees; and the Paris of Owen Johnson's 
"In the Name of Liberty"; and the Paris which Robert 



THE PARIS OF SOME AMERICANS 187 

W. Chambers knew so well In the days when he was 
studying to be a painter, and used as the background 
of his first stories, "The Red Republic," "Ashes of 
Empire," "The Maids of Paradise," "Lorraine," and 
the short tales of " In the Quarter." 

There was an extremely amusing, justly popular, 
though of course utterly unimportant novel of five or 
six years ago, which reflected accurately, even though It 
was frankly designed in a spirit of burlesque, the atti- 
tude of many of our fellow-countrymen travelling in 
Europe In the days before the war. That was Harry 
Leon Wilson's "Ruggles of Red Gap" a tale, which, 
in its opening chapters, the best chapters, by the way, 
was riotous of Paris. The Flood family In general, and 
"Cousin Egbert" In particular, happened to come from 
the Far Western community of Red Gap, where an old 
family meant one that had settled In Red Gap before 
the spur was built out to the canning factory. "Cousin 
Egbert," a victim of feminine domination, was acquiring 
the rudiments of Louvre art at a certain corner cafe, 
under the watchful eye of the mystified Ruggles, when 
his cultural meditations were disturbed by the unex- 
pected, but not unwelcome. Intrusion of one "JefF" 
Tuttle. For the actual scenes Involved In the en- 
suing "Odyssey" the reader Is referred to the following 
letter from Mr. Wilson: 

•That Paris debauch of Ruggles ensued from my observations and 
notes on the habits of visiting Americans in Paris. Particularly 
Americans from west of Pittsburgh. I laboured like a true scientist 
in making those observations. The meeting of Cousin Egbert and 
JefF Tuttle was before the Cafe de la Paix, and their comprehending 



i88 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

cocker took them for luntheon to a " Rendez-vous des cockers fideles" 
near the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard 
Raspall. They found their carrousel by proceeding out the Boule- 
vard Raspail and past the Lion de Belfort. I myself forget just 
where it lay in relation to that monument, but not many blocks from 
it. 

It was in the Boulevard Montparnasse that Harry- 
Leon Wilson lived at one time, sharing an apartment 
there with JuHan Street, whose "Paris a la Carte" 
is a book in which Americans gastronomically inclined 
will find both instruction and entertainment. The 
number was 137. There Mr. Wilson wrote *'Ewing's 
Lady," and in collaboration with Booth Tarkington, 
the plays "Foreign Exchange" and "Your Humble 
Servant." A more widely popular result of the collabo- 
ration was "The Man from Home," written in five 
weeks in the autumn of 1906 at a villa called "Colline 
des Roses" at Champigny, that was temporarily the 
home of Mr. Tarkington. 

There is much of Paris in Booth Tarkington's "The 
Guest of Quesnay," "The Beautiful Lady," and "His 
Own People." It was the pathetic occupation of the 
impoverished Ansolini of "The Beautiful Lady" to sit 
from ten in the morning to midday, and from four to 
seven in the afternoon, at one of the small tables under 
the awning of the Cafe de la Paix at the comer of the 
Place de I'Opera, that is to say the centre of the civilized 
world, exposing his head as a living advertisement of 
the least amusing ballet in Paris. That story was writ- 
ten in the Rue de Clichy, about a man the author had 
seen, and whose memory haunted him. The balloon 



THE PARIS OF SOME AMERICANS 189 

ascension at the Porte Maillot, which Ansolini 
shared with his incorrigible pupil Poor Jr., was also 
drawn from a personal experience. For ten nights in 
succession Mr. Tarkington had made the ascent, dining 
joyously among the clouds. The eleventh night, 
through the merest chance, the venture was abandoned. 
Late that evening the author learned from the news- 
papers that those who had made the ascent in place of 
his own party had experienced adventures not outlined 
in the programme. The ropes which held the balloon 
captive had parted, the car had been carried miles away 
from Paris, and finally the gas bag had exploded. Only 
the presence of mind and resourcefulness of the aeronaut 
in charge had saved all from instant destruction. A 
man to whom Mr. Tarkington had recommended the 
delights of the trip was waiting his turn to go up and 
witnessed the show. He visited the author to thank 
him — pointedly. 

"His Own People" was written at Champigny. The 
story of the crooks in that tale was founded on two 
groups that Mr. Tarkington knew. From the original 
of the Hon. Chanler Pedlow the author bought his first 
motor car, which he describes as "an idle, roaring Fiat." 
"The Guest of Quesnay" was written in the Rue de 
Tournon, where, in an apartment at No. 20, Mr. 
Tarkington lived for three years, and which he recalls 
as his favourite Paris home. To quote from a letter 
on the subject: 

It was the top number of that wonderful little street. No one 
could live long enough to get all its steny, from the time when the 



I90 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Luxembourg was a Roman camp, Moliere played where Foyot's is 
now. From the Rue de Tournon Daudet went out in his overcoat- 
less dress suit. Renan lived there. Balzac lived there. Just 
around the corner were the haunts of Aramis and Company. The 
old streets of the Musketeers are there yet, with most of the names, 
at least, unchanged since young D'Artagnan found himself in that 
row over the baldric of Forthos, the handkerchief of Aramis, and the 
shoulder of Athos. Francois Villon was close at hand. ... I 
dined often at Foyot's and found there a waiter whom I put into 
"The Guest of Quesnay," transferring him to the "Trois Pigeons," 
and calling him Amedee. . . . There was the flavour of Victor 
Cherbuliez in "The Guest of Quesnay." "Samuel Brohl et Cie" 
was then one of my favourite novels. . . . There was something 
of a semi-Bohemian life; Americans, and all nationalities of artists. 
Over the river, in a place near the Gare Saint-Lazare, the Wednes- 
day Club lunched. It was made up mostly of correspondents of 
American newspapers. . . . Ah! the Rue de Tournon! I still 
haunt that neighbourhood in my thoughts of Paris, but the last time 
I saw it was in 191 1, when I went to that corner and looked up at the 
stone balcony that used to be mine and wondered who was living 
there — one moonlight night. 

Foyot's. Mr. Tarklngton is far from being alone 
among American novelists in his liking for the cuisine 
and atmosphere of that Latin Quarter tavern, where 
real senators of France from the near-by Palace of the 
Luxembourg may be seen contentedly breakfasting over 
napkins tucked in at the chin. It has figured in pages 
by Owen Johnson, who is never tired of singing its 
praises. Dining one day at Foyot's Louis Joseph 
Vance found the suggestion of "The Lone Wolf," whose 
adventures were later continued in "The False Faces." 
Foyot's, the "Troyon's" of the story, has two entrances, 
one on the Rue Vaugirard and the other on the Rue de 



THE PARIS OF SOME AMERICANS 191 

Toumon. The Lone Wolf was brought up in the curi- 
ous atmosphere, and the two entrances and their possi- 
biUties are factors in the working out of the tale. Some- 
where not far from Foyot's was "The Street of the Two 
Friends," of F. Berkeley Smith's story of that name, 
which sang the praises of the old Latin Quarter, the old 
joyous quarter where social conventions were as little 
regarded as the Commandments east of Suez. There 
was Paris in Cleveland Moffett's "The Mysterious 
Card" and "Through the Wall"; and in Samuel Mer- 
win's "The Honey Bee," which pictured the city just 
before the outbreak of the war, and the newly born 
French enthusiasm for the prize ring; and in the "Zut" 
of the late Guy Wetmore Carryll. The last name sug- 
gests a story illustrating the inefFectuality of fame. 
The concierge of an apartment house in which Mr. 
Carryll once went to live was much interested in learn- 
ing the American's metier. "Monsieur's name is Guy 
and Monsieur is a writer. There was another Guy who 
lived here many years ago who was also a writer. May- 
be Monsieur has heard of him. His name was Guy de 
Maupassant. I don't know what has become of him. 
Perhaps he is dead." 

Then there was the gifted author of "The Pit," "The 
Octopus," and "The Wolf," who died so young, so 
rich in promise, and just as he was swinging into the full 
stride of achievement. At seventeen years of age 
Frank Norris, intending to be an artist, went to France, 
and enrolled as a student at the "Ateher Julien" in 
Paris. There he remained two years and became ab- 
sorbed, not in art, but in chivalry. The reading of 



192 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Froissart's "Chronicles" was his daily recreation. He 
became so imbued with the spirit of mediaevahsm that 
once with much amusement he pointed out an error 
in Scott's "Ivanhoe" in which one of the characters is 
described as wearing a certain kind of armour that was 
not in use until a hundred years later; a mistake that 
was as obvious to him as if someone to-day should 
depict Louis XIV in a top hat and frock coat. It was 
in those Paris days that Frank Norris began to write. 
His earhest ventures, his brother Charles G. Norris 
has told us, were more to provide a vehicle for his illus- 
trations than for any interest he had in writing itself. 
Thus it was that his first novel, "Robert d'Artois," 
crude and amateurish, was written. 

Leaving Frank in Paris to continue his art studies 
the rest of the Norris family returned to California. 
Correspondence between the brothers took the form 
of a novel written by Frank in which all their favourite 
characters appeared revolving about Charles, who was 
described as the nephew of the Duke of Burgundy. The 
story was written in the second person on closely ruled 
note paper. It came to America in chapters, rolled up 
inside French newspapers to save postage. Every in- 
stalment was profusely illustrated with pencil sketches, 
mostly of Charles as an esquire, a man-at-arms, an 
equerry, and finally as a knight. Plots and episodes 
from the works of Scott, Francis Bacon, Frank Stock- 
ton, and others werehfted bodily; sometimes the actual 
wording was borrowed. There was one sentence: 
"The night closed down as dark as a wolf's mouth,'* 
that, years later, Charles found again in the opening of a 



THE PARIS OF SOME AMERICANS 193 

chapter of "Quentin Durward." The story was never 
concluded, but those Paris days were reflected in the 
dedication of **The Pit": 

In memory of certain lamentable tales of the round (dining-room) 
table heroes; of the epic of the pewter platoons, and the romance 
cycle of "Gaston le Fox" which we invented, maintained, and found 
marvellous when we both were boys. 

Even in the pages of O. Henry may be found the Paris 
trail. Even he, for a moment, saw fit to forsake the 
purlieus of his Little Old Bagdad-on-the-Subway, the 
lotos-eating atmosphere of Caribbean-washed shores, 
mountain paths in the Cumberland, and waving Western 
prairies, to allow his fancy to play about valleys of the 
Eure-et-Loir and winding streets and gabled houses 
of old Lutetia. There was, once upon a time, in what 
we like to refer to richly and sonorously as the "red- 
heeled days of seigneurial France," a poet, David Mig- 
not by name, who left his father's flock in Vernoy to 
follow the "Roads of Destiny." Of the three forks 
of the way that he encountered at the beginning of his 
journey, all of which led to the same grim end by the 
pistol of Monseigneur, the Marquis de Beaupertuys, 
only one, the right branch, wound on to the city by the 
Seine. There David crossed a great bridge, and found 
shelter high up under the eaves of an old house in the 
Rue Conti. That street, and the Rue Esplanade, where 
the plotters planned to bring about the King's death, 
and the Rue Christopher, where the premature attack 
reached the heart of the poor poet dressed in the King's 
robes, have none the less the flavour of old Paris for 



194 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

being frankly streets of illusion. And also here, in 
** Roads of Destiny," we have a new O. Henry, an un- 
familiar O. Henry, an O. Henry shorn for once of riotous 
malapropisms and the extravagant argot of his native 
land. "Describe her," commands the King, and David 
tells of the woman of the Rue Conti whose beauty 
and guile have sent him unknowingly to his doom: 
" She is made of sunshine and deep shade. She is slender, 
like the alders, and moves with their grace. Her eyes 
change while you gaze in them; now round, and then 
half shut as the sun peeps between two clouds. When 
she comes, heaven is all about her; when she leaves, 
there is chaos and a scent of hawthorn blossoms." 



PART II 
ABOUT RURAL FRANCE 



XIII. THE MAGIC OF THE SEINE 

Between Paris Quais — The Parisian Afield — The Musketeers 
in the Environs — The River and Guy de Maupassant — Meudon 
and " Trilby" — The Trail of "Peter Ihhetson" — "Samuel Brohl 
et Cie." — Versailles — The Forest of Fontainehleau — Daudet's 
" Sapho" — Ville-D'Avray, Chaville, and the Lake of Enghien. 

WHAT is the magic of the Seine? As, in its 
course from Charenton to Boulogne it bisects 
the city, it is in itself neither an impressive nor 
a beautiful stream, yet the Parisians adore it. From 
early spring till late autumn thousands of them line 
the stone wharves to fish stolidly in the muddy waters. 
Yet there is not even a legend that within the memory 
of man any one ever saw a fish caught there, or heard 
of one being caught. But the thousands of Parisians 
are happy in the innocent and ennui-ViWing pastime, so 
it is really their own affair. So consider them with tol- 
erant eyes as, from the deck of one of the little bateaux- 
omnibus, we watch, when not in the shadow of the 
bridges, the swiftly changing scene of splendid quais and 
stately spires and edifices equally rich in material 
beauty and historical significance. A hundred char- 
acters of fiction line the banks or people the structures 
as the quivering little boat dashes from landing pier to 
landing pier. Yonder, dominating the Quai Malaquais, 
are windows which perhaps only yesterday belonged to 

197 



198 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

the delightful old book-worm of Anatole's France's 
"Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard." There Sylvestre 
sat in his slippers and dressing gown, contemplating 
the blazing logs, stroking his cat Hamilcar, and listening 
to the scoldings of his housekeeper, Therese. A 
hundred yards to the westward is the corner of the 
antiquary shop where Raoul touched destiny in the 
shape of the shagreen skin of the Balzac tale. But 
there are too many of these amiable ghosts to think of 
considering them all. In time the last city bridge is 
passed and the river begins its eccentric windings be- 
tween green fields. 

The Parisians of fiction would not be real Parisians at 
all if there were not moments when they were seized with 
the spirit of mild adventure that moves them to venture 
forth beyond the line of the old fortifications in search 
of pastoral joys. There are very few of the novels deal- 
ing with the life of Lutetia that do not occasionally take 
their men and women to Vincennes, or Saint-Cloud, or 
Versailles, or Enghien, or Bougival. It matters not 
whether the tale be of the seventeenth or the twentieth 
century. Usually it is along the line of the Seine, but 
not always. For the purpose of illustration let us revert 
to those stories dealing with the careers of the Dumas 
Four: Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D'Artagnan, to whom 
reference is so frequent in the course of this volume. In 
every direction from the old city gates leads their trail. 
Vincennes: It was from the castle there that the Duke 
of Beaufort made his famous escape with the assistance 
of the silent Grimaud, and by means of the rope ladder, 
the gag, and the poniard that were conveyed to him 



THE MAGIC OF THE SEINE 199 

under the crust of a magnificent pie. Noisy: It was 
there that D'Artagnan found Aramis in a monastery, 
an Abbe who wanted to become again a Musketeer, 
just as in the earher days with a rapier by his side he 
had always yearned for the garb of an ecclesiast. Saint- 
Germain: It was there that the wily, devoted, yet 
unappreciated Gascon conveyed the young king, the 
queen mother and the cardinal that night in the tur- 
bulent days of the Fronde. Reuil: It was in the 
Orangery there that D'Artagnan contrived his own 
escape and the escape of his comrades, and outwitted 
the crafty Mazarin. Bringing the Dumas trail down 
to more modern times we have to go only to Auteuil to 
seek the house in which the Count of Monte-Cristo 
gave the wonderful dinner at which he invented the 
story that brought such terror to the hearts of Villefort 
and Madame Danglars. 

Every turn of the winding Seine for twenty miles 
below Paris is associated with the tales of Guy de Mau- 
passant, who loved the river only a Uttle less than he 
loved the shores of the Mediterranean and the Norman 
coast. As the boat passes Saint-Cloud one may see the 
restaurant gardens where Monsieur Parent achieved 
the terrible revenge for which he had been waiting for 
twenty years. Farther along the river, in the neigh- 
bourhood of Malmaison — where Josephine lived after 
Napoleon had divorced her — and Bougival, are the 
scenes of the sinister "La Femme de Paul," and the 
unroariously whimsical "Mouche," and a score more 
of the finely chiselled gems of the Norman master. To 
turn to a very different field of fiction: If the reader 



200 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

happens to be interested In the detective story in general 
and those of Gaboriau in particular, he will perhaps 
remember that close to the river bank, at La Jonchere, 
which Is about half way between Malmaison and Bou- 
gival, and they are not far apart, was the cottage of the 
widow Lerouge, the scene of the murder with which 
**L'Affaire Lerouge" begins — a baffling problem, which 
is eventually solved by the ingenious reasoning of 
Pere Tirauclair. 

Here, just beyond the line of the old fortifications, 
Is Meudon, associated with the name of Rabelais, who, 
after his many wanderings, in the last year of his life, was 
appointed cure of Meudon, a title which, though enjoyed 
for so short a time, was destined to endure through the 
centuries. The steamboat station is at Bas-Meudon, 
and it was there, in the Du Maurier story, that there 
was a famous outing from the Place Saint-Anatole des 
Arts, and Taffy proposed matrimony to Trilby, and the 
Laird, in response to the applause that greeted his 
efforts in the art of Terpsichore, said, in French that 
would have astonished Chateaubriand, ^' Foilal'espayce 
de horn her jer szvee.^* 

But once away from the Immediate neighbourhood 
of the Place Saint-Anatole des Arts the name of Du Mau- 
rier conjures up not the figures of "Trilby," but rather 
the men, women, and, above all, children, of the early 
chapters of "Peter Ibbetson," and the early chapters 
of "The Martian." There is in the Paris of to-day 
a "Street of the Pump." To the young eyes of Pierre 
Pasquier de la Mariere, who later became Peter Ib- 
betson, it was a delightful street, leading to Paris at 



THE MAGIC OF THE SEINE 201 

one end, and to the river Seine at the other; or else, 
turning to the right, "to Saint-Cloud through the Bois 
de Boulogne of Louis-Philippe Premier, Roi des Fran^ais 
— as different from the Paris and Bois de Boulogne of 
to-day as a diligence from an express train." On the 
way from Passy to Saint-Cloud there was a pond — "a. 
memorable pond, called *La mare d'Auteuil,' the sole 
aquatic treasure that Louis-Philippe's Bois de Bou- 
logne could boast, for in those ingenuous days there 
existed no artificial lake fed by an artificial stream, no 
Pre-Catalan, no Jardin d'Acclimation." In time, far 
beyond the magic pond went Peter's excursions, "to 
Meudon, Versailles, Saint-Germain, and other delightful 
places." 

A Pilgrim after the present Pilgrim's own heart was 
that little boy of the eighteen-forties, interpreting the 
world through the medium of his ingenious combination 
of two languages known as Inglefrank or Frankingle. 
His journeys from the house in the "Street of the 
Pump" were not all in the direction of the open fields 
and along the banks of the magic Seine. There were 
days given over to what might be called literary prowl- 
ings — to the enjoyment of Paris, "that Paris, not the 
Paris of M. le Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and 
electricity, and flushed and drained by modern science, 
but the good old Paris of Balzac and Eugene Sue and 
'Les Mysteres' — the Paris of dim oil lanterns suspended 
from iron gibbets (where aristocrats had been hung)"; 
through "dark, silent, deserted streets that would turn 
up afterward in many a nightmare — with the gutter 
in the middle and towerlets and stone posts all along 



202 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

the sides, and high, fantastic walls (where it was dejendu 
d'afficher), with bits of old battlement at the top 
. . . and suggestive names printed in old rusty iron let- 
ters at the street corners — theRueVide-Gousset,theRue 
Coupe-Gorge, the Rue de la Vieille Truanderie, the 
Trepas de la Tour de Nesle, that appealed to the 
imagination like a page from Hugo or Dumas." Some- 
how in reading the Du Maurier pages there comes 
over the present Pilgrim a sense of futility. Peter 
Ibbetson struck the note so much better long, long 
years ago. 

Keeping for the moment to fiction written in the 
English language, there is plenty of material in the 
environs of Paris which lie beyond the city's west- 
erly gates. It wa^ somewhere in this direction that 
little Rawdon Crawley was put out to nurse, being 
regarded as an incumbrance likely to interfere with 
the social aspirations of his respected mother. In 
tales of later origin and more ephemeral fibre we may 
select an auherge on the river bank that was associated 
with occasional outings of Mr. Merrick's Tricotrin, 
or accompany Septimus and Emmy of Mr. W. J. 
Locke's book on little excursions that enriched their 
lives, or with Poor Jr., of Mr. Tarkington's "The Beau- 
tiful Lady" make heavy and indiscreet wagers for the 
benefit of the French Government in the pesage at 
Longchamp, or follow the road to Versailles to pick out 
the exact spot where, as related in "The Guest of Ques- 
nay," took place the motor-car accident that so changed 
the current of the story. 

The name of Tarkington suggests a novel that has al- 




"Most of the streets were very narrow and had no sidewalks. Pedes- 
trians were obliged to take refuge from passing carriages on shop thiesholds, 
under entrance gates, or else beside posts erected here and there for that 
purpose." — Victorien Sardou. 



THE MAGIC OF THE SEINE 203 

ways been his particular admiration, and a writer, who, 
probably more than any other, has influenced his liter- 
ary style. It was reading Victor Cherbuliez's *' Samuel 
Brohl et Cie.," when he was living in the Rue de Tour- 
non that led almost directly to the writing of "The 
Guest of Quesnay." The scene of the great situation 
of "Samuel Brohl et Cie." — which for sheer surprise is 
not surpassed in all fiction — is at Cormeilles, a village on 
the banks of the Seine, which, from its height of five 
or six hundred feet, commands a superb view of the 
valley and of Paris in the distance. From the terrace, 
in an air laden with the scent of flowers, the Polish 
Count Abel Larinski surveyed the landscape. He saw 
Saint-Germain, its forest, the sun-kissed Seine spanned 
by the two bridges of Maisons-LafHtte, to his left the 
bastions of Mont-Valerien, and in the distance, Paris, 
the Arch of Triumph, the gilded dome of the Invahdes, 
and the columns of smoke from the factories, that held 
their rigid form, or vanished, swept away by the wind. 
Then his vision travels beyond, to a miserable drinking 
den within the Jewish pale of Poland, smelling of garlic 
and candle grease, where Samuel Brohl passed his early 
youth; and gradually, as the picture is unrolled, there 
comes to the amazed reader the knowledge that the 
aristocrat Larinski and the wretched Samuel Brohl are 
one and the same being. 

Then there is Versailles. Consider all the fiction 
that has been written about the person and court of 
Louis the Magnificent and the ladies for whom he built 
the Trianons — the overflowing company of romancers, 
with the good Dumas at their head, who have found 



204 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

backgrounds in Versailles as it was in the days of Bour- 
bon splendour! Consider, and then turn to the **Medi- 
tations at Versailles" of Thackeray. See the picture 
of the great king transporting himself there in 1681, 
from the gloomy palace of Saint-Germain, whence he 
could catch a glimpse of a certain white spire of Saint- 
Denis, where his race lay buried, an unhappy memento 
mori, transporting himself with bag and baggage — with 
guards, cooks, chamberlains, mistresses, Jesuits, gentle- 
men, lackeys, Fenelons, Molieres, Lauzuns, Bossuets, 
Villars, Villeroys, Louvois, and Colberts. 

Did ever the sun shine upon such a king before, in such a palace? — 
or, rather, did such a king ever shine upon the sun? When Majesty 
came out of his chamber, in the midst of his superhuman splendours, 
viz., in his cinnamon-coloured coat, embroidered with diamonds; his 
pyramid of a wig; his red-heeled shoes, that lifted him four inches 
from the ground "that he scarcely seemed to touch"; when he came 
out, blazing upon the dukes and duchesses that waited his rising, — 
what could the latter do, but cover their eyes, and wink, and trem- 
ble? And did he not himself believe, as he stood there, on his high 
heels, under his ambrosial periwig, that there was something in him 
more than man — something above fate? 

Or, to use the words of Thackeray in the first of his 
lectures on the Four Georges: "A grander monarch, or 
a more miserable starved wretch than the peasant his 
subject, you cannot look upon.'* 

With a greater monarch than Louis another palace 
is associated. And Fontainebleau, like Versailles, is 
rich with the figures of fiction. Robert Louis Steven- 
son pictured its forest in "The Wrecker," taking for 



THE MAGIC OF THE SEINE 205 

the purposes of the tale persons whom he had known 
there in the Hfe during his own days among the painters. 
Any oak in the Forest of Fontainebleau will serve as 
the one under which Brigadier Etienne Gerard, in the 
Conan Doyle story, disposed of the Brothers of Ajaccio, 
thereby removing the menace that had been hanging 
over the head of Napoleon since the early Corsican 
years. But for the full charm of the forest turn to the 
later chapters of Guy de Maupassant's "Notre Coeur. " 
There Andre de Marolle goes to escape from the net in 
which Madame de Burne holds him, to encounter a new 
woman, and yet finally, almost at a nod, to bind himself 
once more with the chains of the old slavery. 

If, in his excursions into the environs of Paris and 
along the banks of the Seine the Pilgrim were limited to 
one travelling companion his immediate choice would 
be for the books of Alphonse Daudet. And among 
them one volume alone would suffice for a pilgrimage 
of many days. **Sapho," to the Pilgrim's mind Dau- 
det's masterpiece, and one of the finest novels written 
in any language, is a story of the fields, woods, and 
waters that lie beyond the fortifications as much as it 
i\s a story of the city's murky skies and rain-splashed 
pavements. Fanny Legrand adored the country, in 
snatches, except those haunts that were frequented by 
painters. The first summer of their life en collage being 
very beautiful, they visited all the pretty corners of 
the environs of Paris that she knew so well. One night, 
at Saint-Clair, in the valley of the Chevreuse, they 
passed on the straw of a barn. At Ville-d'Avray, 
lunching before the pool, they fell in with the sculptor 



2o6 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Caoudal, who bored them with his reminiscences, and 
went off in high dudgeon, after assuming Pere Langlois^s 
bill. It was at Ville-d'Avray, very likely at the same 
inn, that Barty Josselin and "le grand Bonzig," of Du 
Maurier's "The Martian," found entertainment on a 
memorable outing from Paris. Near Ville-d'Avray, 
on the Versailles line, is the little town of Chaville, so 
intimately linked with the lives of Jean and 
Fanny. 

There, after Fanny's venture as directress of the 
Champs-Elysees pension of Rosario Sanches, they in- 
stalled themselves, in an old hunting box, facing the 
Pave des Gardes, just across the street from the railway 
station. The Hettemas were their neighbours, and 
never have the joys of suburban life been painted 
more feelingly than in the words of the fiercely 
bearded, timid Hettema. 

Ce n'est rien maintenant, mals vous verrez en decembre! On 
rentre crotte, mouille, avec tous les embetements de Paris sur le dos; 
on trouve bon feu, bonne lampe, la soupe qui embaume, et, sous la 
table, une paire de sabots remplis de paille. Non, voyez-vous, quand 
on s'est fourre une platee de choux et de saucisses, un quartier de 
gruyere tenu au frais sous le linge, quand on a verse la-dessus un 
litre de ginglard qui n'a pas passe par Bercy, libre de bapteme et 
d'entree, ce que c'est bon de titer son fauteuil au coin du feu, d'allu- 
mer une pipe, en buvant son cafe arrose d'un caramel a I'eau-de-vie, 
et de piquer un chien en face I'un de I'autre, pendant que le verglas 
degouline sur les vitres. Oh! un tout petit chien, le temps de laisser 
passer le gros de la digestion. Apres on dessine un moment, la 
femme dessert, fait son petit train-train — la couverture, le moine — et 
quand elle est couchee, la place chaude, on tombe dans le tas, et 9a 
vous fait par tout le corps une chaleur comme si Ton entrait tout 
entier dans la paille de ses sabots. 



THE MAGIC OF THE SEINE 207 

It is nothing now, but wait till December. You come home 
muddy, damp, with all the annoyances of Paris on your back; you 
find a good fire, a lighted lamp, a savory soup, and under the table 
a pair of wooden shoes filled with straw. When you have finished 
a plate of cabbage and sausage, and a slice of cheese kept moist 
under a napkin, and swallowed a bottle of wine that hasn't paid 
custom duty, it is good to draw up your arm chair to the fire, light a 
pipe, drink your coffee laced with brandy, and take a little nap 
while the rain freezes on the window panes. Just a little nap, to aid 
digestion. Then you draw a bit, the wife clears the table, jumps 
into bed, and when the place is warm, you tumble in too and you 
feel comfortable all over. 



He became almost eloquent in picturing his material 
joys, this bearded giant, usually so timid that he could 
hardly utter two words without blushing and stam- 
mering. The placid Hettemas were the neighbours of 
Fanny and Jean throughout the turbulent years. They 
came to an end as they were bound to, those years. In 
the quiet of the woods so close to the railway station 
Jean undertook to tell the woman of his decision and 
projected marriage, and the dark aisles rang and rang 
again with her implorings and reproaches. Then, worn 
out at last, she returned to the hunting-box, and fell on 
the food before her like a shipwrecked sailor {se jeter 
sur les plats glouttonnement, comme un naufrage). To 
Chaville Jean returned after the separation, driven 
there by jealousy; and it was at a table of the little 
station cafe, from which she could see through the trees 
the house in which they had experienced such happy 
and such cruel moments, that Fanny wrote the letter 
of farewell with which the book ends. "You are free. 



208 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

You will never hear of me more. Jdieu, un haiser, 
Ic dernier^ da^is le cou, m^ami. . . ." 

One more "Sapho" association. Eight miles north 
of Paris there is Enghien, with its pretty lake sur- 
rounded by villas with gardens that run down to the 
water's edge. One of these villas belonged to Rosario 
Sanchez, and it was there that she invited Jean and 
Fanny to meet certain ancient wrecks of the Second 
Empire, and later to dismiss them in a moment of 
furious temper. In a rowboat near the shore Gaussin 
and De Potter sat and bailed, and the musician, "the 
pride of the French school," poured out in a monoto- 
nous, even tone, his life story, and urged it as a terrible 
warning to Jean. 




MONT SAINT-MICHEL 



XIV. CHIMES OF NORMANDY 



The Ro77iance of Old Names — Calais and Thackeray's "DeS" 
seins" — Boulogne and "The Nezvcomes'' — Conan Doyle's 
"Uncle Bernac" — Fecamp, Etretat, and Guy de Maupassant — ■ 
Havre" Pierre et Jean," and Henry James's " Four Meetings" — ' 
The Literary Creed of Maupassant — Balzac's "Modeste Mig~ 
non" — Sands of Trouville — Ouida's "Moths" — Booth Tark" 
ington's " The Guest of Quesnay" — The Kings of Yvetot — Mont 
Saint-Michel — Rouen and "Madame B ovary" — The Real Y. — ■ 
The Style of Gustave Flaubert — " Bel- A mi," and " Boule-de- 
Suif" — Leonard Merrick's "Conrad in Quest of His Youth" 

IN THE eighty-seven departments into which the 
French Repubhc was divided at the outbreak of 
the Great War there was poHtical and administra- 
tive expediency. In the old divisions of the land which 
have come down from Feudal days there are the magic 
of names and the romance of history and fiction. Till 
the end of time they seem likely to persist. Normandie, 

209 . 



2IO THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Bretagne, Poitou, Gascogne, Provence, Anjou, Ile-de- 
France, Champagne, Lorraine, Beam, Nivernais, Bour- 
gogne, Dauphine, Languedoc, Artois, Picardie, Franche- 
Comte, Auvergne, Limousin, Touraine, Maine, Guy- 
enne, Bourbonnais, Berry, Orleanais! What dreams 
of the old, bygone world the very names inspire! The 
roll-call rings with the history of France. Charles 
Martel flings back the Saracens at Tours; Majesty 
challenges the vassal: Qui t' a fait due?, and the vassal 
retorts Qui fa fait roi?; the great cathedral of Chartres 
is built; Agincourt and Crecy are fought; the Maid 
comes out of Domremy; and Henry of Navarre, the 
"Bearnais" — whom the Parisians still adore, possibly, as 
some cynic has suggested, because he is dead — bears his 
oriflamme at Ivry. In talking or writing of the old 
provinces to-day there is permitted a certain latitude. 
Border lines are not so sharply drawn. So for the 
purpose of this chapter, where allusion is made to 
Boulogne or Calais, Normandy must be considered in 
temporary successful invasion of Picardy and Artois. 

The Pilgrim, who has passed by way of Calais half 
a dozen times, and stayed there twice, confesses to 
lamentable ignorance of the history and the end of the 
institution once known as Desseins. Yet for the flavour 
of the city — the loss of which so distressed Queen Mary 
of England that she said that, after her death, its name 
would be found written on her heart — he knows of no 
more delightful and stimulating reading than the 
"Roundabout Paper" of Thackeray that is called 
"Desseins." It is fiction, as that other Roundabout 
Paper, "The Notch on the Axe" is fiction; as surely fie- 



CHIMES OF NORMANDY 211 

tion as "Vanity Fair," or " Pendennis," or ** Esmond " are 
fiction. At Dessein's, described as *'that charming old 
'Hotel Dessein', with its court, its gardens, its lordly 
kitchen, its princely waiter, who has welcomed the 
finest company in Europe," Mr. Roundabout slept and 
dreamed dreams. And, out of the past, ghosts came to 
his bedside: that of Laurence Sterne, with his mawkish 
sentimentality, and his impatience with posterity for 
its praise of Henry Fielding, and with Mr. Irving, "an 
American gentleman of parts and elegance," for having 
written a life of "an Irish fellow by the name of Gould- 
smith, who used to abuse me"; and the ghost of Brum- 
mell, with his snuff box, and wig, and dirty, disreputable 
dressing gown, and his stories of Carlton House, and the 
fat and ungrateful Prince, and York, and Alvanley, and 
Raikes, and Boothby, and Dutch Sam the boxer; and 
the ghost of the very old man with the long white beard 
and the rope round his neck who in the life had been 
Master Eustace of St. Peter's, one of the six who gave 
themselves up as ransom when King Edward of Eng- 
land besieged the city. The ten-page paper is one of 
those charming whimsicalities that interpret a city 
as it could not be interpreted by a hundred ponderous 
volumes. 

Again, at Boulogne, it is to Thackeray that one is 
inclined to turn, and to the pages of "The Newcomes." 
There, after financial disaster had descended upon the 
kindly head of Colonel "Tom" Newcome, and, like 
Belisarius, he went into exile, he found a refuge in 
quarters in a quiet, grass-grown old street of the Old 
Town. Thousands of other unfortunate Britons were 



212 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

in the same case: and Pendennis, visiting the Colonel, 
strolled along by the pretty old walks and bastions, 
under the pleasant trees that shadow them, and the 
gray old gabled houses from which you look down upon 
the gay new city, and the busy port, with the piers 
stretching into the shining sea, dotted with a hundred 
white sails or black smoking steamers, and bounded 
by the friendly lines of the bright English shore. Per- 
haps it was the presence of the unpleasant Mrs. Mac- 
kenzie that sent Pendennis to the Hotel des Bains. 
There is to-day in Boulogne a hotel of much the same 
name, but then what French watering place is without 
its Hotel des Bains? After Thackeray it is another 
English writer of fiction and another English book that 
Boulogne suggests. All about the town when Napoleon, 
was gathering his legions there for the projected descent 
upon England were the scenes of Conan Doyle's "Uncle 
Bernac," and the Pilgrim knows of no book in any 
language that, within so brief a space, gives a more 
vivid picture of the many sides of the great Corsican. 
Fran9ois, the valet of Guy de Maupassant, told of 
an Enghsh Lord with a natural curiosity as to the actual 
house of *'La Maison Tellier." So in company with 
the novelist he travelled to Fecamp, which is the scene 
of the tale, and Maupassant pointed out a structure, 
and the Englishman recognized it at once by the de- 
scription in the story. As a matter of fact, the Maison 
Tellier was situated in reality at Rouen, but Maupas- 
sant had reasons of his own for transporting the nar- 
rative from the inland city to the seacoast town. But 
Fecamp and its region is the Maupassant country as 



CHIMES OF NORMANDY 213 

Ayrshire is the Burns country, the Doone Valley the 
Blackmore country, or the Blue Grass of Kentucky 
the James Lane Allen country. About here were the 
scenes of the pitiless "Une Vie." In forty tales he 
satirized the Norman peasantry as Gyp satirized them 
in "Ces Bons Normands." For Etretat, between its 
two falaises the name of Guy de Maupassant stands 
more than does the name of Alphonse Karr, who 
founded it. There was "La Guillette," and in the 
garden, the house made of an overturned boat in which 
Francois lived. There, among others, "Bel-Ami" 
was finished, and the greater part of "Pierre et Jean" 
written. 

Havre was, before the war, of all seaports, the most 
direct approach to France. Travellers from America 
by the boats of the C. G. T. rarely stayed there on 
arrival, save in cases like that of Caroline Spencer of 
Henry James's "Four Meetings" — to which allusion 
will be made later — but they often learned to know the 
city while waiting for the home-bound vessel, playing 
the "Petits Chevaux" at Frascati's, and venturing 
into the old town to dine at a table at Tortoni's. To 
the Pilgrim, as to others who know the Maupassant 
novel, Havre will ever be dominated by the shadow 
of "Pierre et Jean." The long jetty stretching into 
the sea recalls the figures of the brothers sitting in the 
darkness, the elder wracked by the terrible suspicion 
that is beginning to burn in his brain. After the return 
from the fishing excursion, with which the book opens, the 
father, mother, and two sons, accompanied by Madame 
Rosemilly, passed up the Rue de Paris, stopping in the 



214 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Place de la Bourse in order that old Roland might con- 
template the ships in the Bassin du Commerce. The 
Rolands lived in the Rue Belle-Normande. The lights 
of the harbour bring to mind a memorable bit of descrip- 
tion. 

To the right, above Sainte-Adresse, the two lighthouses,' hke two 
great twin Cyclops, throwing over the sea their long and powerful 
rays. . . Then, on the two jetees, two other flames, children of 
these giants, pointing out the entrance to the harbour, and yonder, 
across the Seine, other lights, many others, fixed or flashing, with 
brilliant eflFulgence and dark eclipses, opening and closing like eyes — 
the eyes of ports, yellow, red, green — watching over the dark sea 
covered with ships; living eyes of the hospitable shore, saying by 
the opening and shutting of their lids: "Here I am. I am Trouville! 
I am Honfleur! I am the river of Pont-Audemer! " 

And then, on the vast sea, here and there stars are visible. They 
tremble in the night mist, small, near or far, and also white, green, 
or red. Most of them are still, but some move. They are the lights 
of vessels at anchor waiting for the incoming tide, or of ships seeking 
the roadstead. 

In the course of this Pilgrimage an occasional digres- 
sion may be permitted. So a word about the preface 
to "Pierre et Jean" in which Maupassant ex- 
pounded his literary creed. The pubhc, he held, was 
composed of different groups who demanded: "Console 
me," "Amuse me," "Sadden me," "Soften me," "Make 
me dream," "Make me laugh," "Make me shudder," 
"Make me think," "Make me weep." "The reader, 
who in a book seeks only to satisfy the natural tendency 
of his mind, considers striking or well written the work 
or the passage that pleases his imagination, be it ideal- 



CHIMES OF NORMANDY 215 

istic, gay, jolly, sad, dreamy, or positive." "Only a 
few rare spirits ask of the artist 'Make for me some- 
thing beautiful, in the form that suits you best, fol- 
lowing your temperament.'" 

"Are there any rules governing the novel, outside 
of which a written narrative should bear another name? 
If 'Don Quixote' is a novel, is 'The Red and the Black' 
also a novel .^ If 'Monte Cristo' is a novel, is 'L'As- 
sommoir' one? Can a comparison be established be- 
tween the 'Elective Affinities' of Goethe, and 'The 
Three Musketeers' of Dumas, Flaubert's 'Madame 
Bovary, ' Feuillet's 'M. de Camors,' Zola's 'Germinal'? 
Which, of these works is a novel? What are the famous 
rules? From where do they come? By virtue of what 
principle, what authority, and what reasoning?" 

Balsac's "Modeste Mignon" begins at Havre, with 
the notary, Latournelle, accompanied by his wife and 
son, walking up to Ingouville, which is a quarter in the 
northern part of the city. Of Ingouville Balzac said 
that, in 18 16, it was to Havre what Montmartre was to 
Paris. Since then, it has become the Auteuil, the Mont- 
morency, in a word, the locality given over to the subur- 
ban residences of the merchants of Havre. 

To revert to the Havre of Henry James's "Four 
Meetings." It is the story, in case the reader chances 
not to know it or has forgotten it, of a little New Eng- 
land woman, Caroline Spencer, who all her life in the 
village of Grimwater has aspired some day to visit 
Europe, and to that end has for years pinched and 
saved. Crossing on the French steamer, every day 
of the voyage she sits in a trance with her face turned 



2i6 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

toward the magical lands that she is so soon to see. 
Upon her arrival in Havre a cousin who has been study- 
ing "art'* in Paris meets her with a story that appeals 
to her sympathies, so she gives him all her money, 
retaining only enough to carry her home again. Her 
whole stay in the Europe of which she has so ardently 
dreamed is one of only a few short hours. Here is 
Henry James's picture of the Rue de Paris, the one 
street of Havre with which every American visitor 
becomes more or less familiar: 

The early autumn day was warm and charming, and our stroll 
through the bright-coloured, busy streets of the old French seaport 
was sufficiently entertaining. We walked along the sunny, noisy 
quays and then turned into a wide pleasant street which lay half in 
sun and half in shade — a French provincial street, that looked like 
an old water-colour drawing: tall, gray, steep-roofed, red-gabled, 
many-storied houses; green shutters on windows and old scroll-work 
above them; flowerpots In balconies and white-capped women in 
doorways. We walked in the shade; all this stretched away on the 
sunny side of the street and made a picture. 

There are pleasant journeys associated with the trail 
to be made from Havre: to Etretat, twenty miles away, 
and the Fecamp of the "Maison Tellier" beyond; to 
the slope of Sainte-Adresse, where Madame Rosemilly 
lived; by boat across the broad mouth of the Seine to 
Honfleur, where Henry V landed in the Shakespeare 
play; through the canal that leads to Caen, where 
Beau Brummell died; or to Trouville and Deauville 
that have naturally been reflected in four score French 
fashionable novels, but which we can see at their best 



CHIMES OF NORMANDY 217 

in the pages of Maupassant. Here is a bit from "Pierre 
et Jean": 

From the distance she seemed a long garden filled with bursting 
flowers. On the great bank of yellow sand, from the jetty to the 
Roches Noires, parasols of every colour, hats of every shape, dresses 
of every shade, in groups before the bathing houses, in lines along the 
sea, or scattered here and there, resembled, in truth, enormous 
bouquets in an immeasurable meadow. The confused sounds, near 
or far, of voices made distinct by the thin air; the calls, the cries of 
children being bathed; the clear laughter of women, all formed a 
sweet unbroken clamour, which was blended with the imperceptible 
sea air, and was inhaled with it. 

Then there was Ouida. One must not entirely forget 
Ouida in Trouville; for it was the scene of "Moths." 
There Lady Dolly received her large-eyed and serious 
daughter, Vera, and Vera fell in love with the golden- 
throated Q)rreze, but was forced to marry the Russian, 
Prince Zouroff. This is how Ouida saw Trouville in 
the opening chapter of that story: 

The yachts came and went, the sands glittered, the music sounded; 
men and women in bright coloured stripes took headers into the tide 
or pulled themselves about in little canoes; the snowy canvas of the 
tents shone like huge white mushrooms, and the faces of all the 
houses were lively with green shutters and awnings brightly striped 
like the bathers. People, the gayest and best-born in Europe, 
laughed and chattered and made love. 

Despite a yarn that was current many years ago to 
the effect that Miss De la Ramee — ^who till her dying 
day professed to hold in particular abhorrence Americans 
and women — was actually of American birth, she can 
hardly be regarded in the light of a compatriot. But 



2i8 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

not far from Trouville there is a distinctly American 
trail, that of Booth Tarkington's "The Guest of Ques- 
nay." In a little town back from the sea, and within 
easy distance of the great watering places, was the 
Hotel des Trois Pigeons, the scene of the later chapters 
of the story. That novel was written by Mr. Tarking- 
ton when he was living in the Rue de Tournon in Paris. 
For the purposes of fiction he went one day into the 
near-by restaurant of Foyot's, seized figuratively a fa- 
vourite waiter, and transported him to the salle-d- 
manger of the Trois Pigeons. There the waiter became 
the delightful Amedee of the tale. 

One of the first stations on the railway line running 
from Havre to Paris is Yvetot. Once with the little 
town, now numbering seven or eight thousand inhabi- 
tants, were associated the ancient counts or soi-disant 
kings. All that was long, long ago, but in the event 
that the train stops for two minutes at the gare it is 
worth while recalling that Beranger wrote a delightful 
song (of which Thackeray made two admirable adapta- 
tions) beginning: 

II y avait un Roi d'Yvetot 
Peu connu dans Thistoire, 
Se levant tard, se couchant tot 
Dormant fort bien sans glolre. 

There is a plaintive old song of the Breton peasantry 
bewailing the capricious, feminine changes of course of 
a certain river, for the last winding twist on the journey 
to the sea, apparently unimportant in itself, has far- 
reaching results. It gives Mont Saint-Michel to Nor- 



CHIMES OF NORMANDY 219 

mandy. Rich in history is that towering rock in the bay, 
surfbunded at high tide by lashing waves, and at lovv 
tide by a muddy morass, save where a stone causeway 
joins it to the mainland. The monks of Saint-Michel 
sent ships to help convey the armies of Duke William 
to Hastings, and when the yoke of the Normans on 
England was young two sons of the Conqueror waged 
battle there^ and Robert besieged Henry or Henry be- 
sieged Robert. Then Philip-Augustus burned it and 
it was the only Norman stronghold that withstood 
Henry the Fifth. When the Pilgrim knew Mont Saint- 
Michel, back in the days when the world was young, 
history and scenery were relegated to insignificance by 
the marvellous breakfast of Madame Poulard, a repast 
justly renowned throughout Europe, and carried in 
memory home to the States by returning American 
travellers. For Mont Saint-Michel in fiction it is again 
to Guy de Maupassant that one turns. In splendid 
pages "Notre Cceur" describes the rock and the sur- 
rounding country, the winding cobbly ascent by which 
the dizzy summit is reached; and into a hotel room 
there the Madame de Burne of the story, the original 
of whom played so mysterious and sinister a part in 
Maupassant's own life, went and blew out the candles. 
If Havre, by virtue of "Pierre et Jean," is to be re- 
garded as the literary property of Guy de Maupassant, 
Rouen came even more conspicuously to belong to his 
mentor in the art of writing craftsmanship, Gustave 
Flaubert with "Madame Bovary." Rouen is, on its 
historical side, essentially and first of all the city of 
Jeanne d'Arc, and surely there is nothing in the history 



220 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 



of France more dramatic and more romantic than the 
story, the true story, of La Pucelle. Yet, after all, 
how much less real is the Maid than is Emma Bovary, 
who in one sense never had an actual existence outside 
of the laboriously chiselled pages of Flaubert. In 
Rouen one is never able to get away from the memory 
of Jeanne d'Arc, yet somehow the quaint streets and 
crowded quays conjure up even more vividly the figure 
of that other woman, of whom it may paradoxically 
be said, that she never lived, and that she will live 
forever. 

The association of Rouen with Emma Bovary dated 
from the night of her arrival from Yonville — that night 
when she saw Lagardy in "Lucie de Lammermoor'* 

and met Leon Dupvis 
after their long 
separation. The 
Bovarys, after the ar- 
rival of the diligence, 
had repaired to the 
Hotel of the Red 
Cross in the Place 
Beauvoisin, a con- 
ventional, provincial 
inn with great stables and tiny bedrooms — one of the 
typical hostelries which added so much to the charm of 
France in the early half of the last century. At the time 
that Flaubert's novel was written the Pont Boieldieu was 
not yet built, and the Pont Corneille, the only bridge 
that then crossed the Seine, was known as the Pont 
Neuf. The morning after the play Emma and Leon met 




THE SEINE AT ROUEN 



CHIMES OF NORMANDY 221 

in the cathedral, which is one of the finest in Europe, 
with a north tower dating from the twelfth century. It 
was by the Portail de la Calende, or southern portal, that 
they left the edifice and entered the cab for the famous 
ride which was responsible for the prosecution of 
Flaubert before the Tribunal Correctionnelle de Paris. 
Despite the many changes which took place during the 
latter half of the last century, the visitor in Rouen may 
without great trouble follow, as the Pilgrim has followed, 
the streets indicated in that celebrated journey. 

According to the story, Y, or Yonville-l'Abbaye, thus 
named on account of a former Capuchin Abbey, was 
a town some eight leagues from Rouen, between the 
Abbeville road and the Beauvais road, at the bottom 
of a valley watered by the Rieule, a little river that 
empties into the Andelle. It is one of the very few 
places discussed in the course of this book with which 
the Pilgrim can claim no personal acquaintance. So 
he quotes from an article written by a M. Emile Deshays 
which appeared twelve years ago in Les Annales Polit- 
ique et Litter aire of Paris: 



It was at Ry (thinly disguised as "Y"), a village in the neigh- 
bourhood of Rouen, that Gustave Flaubert laid most of the scenes 
of his immortal "Madame Bovary," and many of the names to be 
found in the pages of the romance still have a familiar ring to the 
people of the town and surrounding country. The present writer 
had, one day, occasion to go to Ry, and occasion is needed to make 
the trip, for to this day the village remains without direct com- 
munication with the outside world. From the moment of arrival 
one is impressed with the marvellous resemblance to the straggling 
community {la bourgade) so^vividly described by Flaubert. There 



222 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

are: the church, surrounded by the little cemetery; the market, 
"consisting of a tile roof supported by twenty posts"; the Mairie, 
"constructed on the plans of an architect of Paris"; the house of the 
chemist and the inn opposite. Everything corresponds to the letter. 
There is also the street (the only one in Ry), "long as a gun barrel," 
to use Flaubert's phrase. 

The present writer had the good fortune of knowing the chemist 
of the place, who always maintained that Flaubert described his 
father; under the name of Homais. Certainly the letters which 
the son showed bore out the contention. It was the same style, the 
same emphasis. Continuing our pilgrimage, we come to the site of 
the first home of Charles Bovary. The house no longer exists; it 
was torn down about a quarter of a century ago. There remain, 
however, part of the garden, and the tunnel and little staircase of 
stone leading to the brook crossed by Emma on her journeys to 
la Huchette. A little farther along, on the other side of the street, 
may be seen the house later occupied by the Bovary family, and the 
scene of the heroine's death. Unfortunately successive restorations 
have taken from the structure all its character, and little remains 
that recalls the novel. 

One of the most interesting features of the trip was the visit to 
Pere Therain, the former driver of the Rouen diligence. In the 
book he appears as Hivert, and it may be remarked that this name 
is formed of nearly the same letters as Therain. Suppressing the 
"a," we have Hinert, which Flaubert changed to Hivert for the sake 
of euphony. As to the name of Bovary, it was suggested by the 
name of a French hotel-keeper whom Flaubert met in Cairo, at the 
time of his famous voyage to the East. The man's name was really 
Bouveret, but Flaubert altered it by giving the ending Ry, the name 
of the town with which the novel deals. 

Perhaps in all the fiction of the nineteenth century 
there is no one passage which has made a greater stir, 
or has been more often quoted as a marvellous example 
of style, than that in "Madame Bovary" describing 
how the Driest administers the extreme unction to the 



CHIMES OF NORMANDY 

dying Emma. This was one of the passages on 
special stress was laid during the famous trial 
served to advertise the book from one | 
end of Europe to the other. Seventeen 
years ago, a writer in the Revue Bleue^ 
who had access to Flaubert's unpub- 
lished papers, discussed the develop- 
ment of that passage. It 
was only after five re- 
writings that Flaubert 
found the permanent and 
definite form. The first 
draft read as follows: 



223 

which 
which 




S^ 









->i 



The priest said the Misereatur and the hidulgentiam, and, extend- 
ing his right hand pronounced the unctions for the redemption of her 
sins, touching the different parts of the body with the end of his 
right thumb, which he dipped each time in the oil which he carried 
in a silver vessel. He touched the eyes, then the eyelids — shutting 
them — then the nostrils, then the lips, then the hands. 

It will be seen that in this first draft Flaubert merely 
outlined the general idea. He indicated the five senses, 
but he had not yet found the figures of speech with 
which to illuminate them. This was the second draft: 

The priest recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, and after 
the words of absolution, dipping his right thumb in the sanctified 
oil, he began the unctions, to efface from all the members the stain 
of sin. With his index finger he closed the eyelids and touched 
first those eyes that . . . the nostrils that had so deUghted 
deHcate odours. . . . the lips (words and gluttonies . . . ), the 
fingers that had been passed through the hair of her lovers and that 
had delighted in all fleshly contact. 



224 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

This is very little changed from the first draft. But 
it will be seen that Flaubert was beginning to organize 
the thoughts that he was to develop for the nostrils, 
the eyes, the lips, and the fingers. In the third draft 
he has some figure of speech to accompany allusions 
to each of the five senses. Still this third draft, as will 
be seen, is very different from the final text. It is as 
follows : 

He pronounced the unctions that were to efface from all the mem- 
bers of the body the stains of sin: first on the eyes, her long eyes in 
other days so full of flame, when they had (desired) coveted all the 
pomps of the world; then on the nostrils, which formerly loved to 
dilate to scent warm breezes and amorous odours; then on the mouth, 
which had lisped tendernesses (delighting in delicate lies) that had 
opened for falsehood and the cries of luxury; then on the hands 
with tapering fingers, of which the soft skin shivered at every con- 
tact, and which would soon no longer feel even the tickling of the 
worms of the tomb. 

The fourth version represents the passage completely 
built up. Flaubert had been adding bit by bit until 
in this fourth draft he had said everything that he 
thought possible to say. That much done, he began 
the work of lopping away whatever he deemed useless. 
The fourth draft is as follows: 

Then he recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiavi, and pro- 
nounced in a high voice some words of absolutism, and dipping his 
thumb in the sanctified oil, he began the unctions; first on the eyes, 
that had so much desired all the pomps of the world; then on the 
nostrils, which formerly had delicately scented warm breezes and 
amorous odours; then on the mouth, which had opened to tell lies, 
which had groaned with pride and cried out in debauchery; then on 



CHIMES OF NORMANDY 225 

the hands, of which the stipple skin . . . formerly had found 
pleasure in tender touching, and zvould soon no longer feel the tickling 
of the worms of the tomb; then on the feet, which had carried her to 
her assignations and tramped the street pavement, and which would 
never walk again. 

The italics above mark those words or ideas which 
Flaubert thought best to suppress or to change in the 
final version, which is as follows : 

The priest recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his 
right thumb in the oil and began the unctions; first on the eyes 
which had so eagerly coveted all the pomps of the world; then on the 
nostrils, which delicately scented warm breezes and amorous odours; 
then on the mouth, which had opened to tell Hes, which had groaned 
with pride, and cried out in debauchery; then on the hands, which, 
had delighted in tender touching; and lastly on the soles of the feet 
once so nimble, when they ran to the satisfaction of their desires, 
and which would never walk again. 

Even in its translated form one cannot fail to see the 
vast superiority of this last version. "Desired" {envie) 
the pomps of the world was a weak word. "Coveted* 
{convoite) is stronger, more exact. Flaubert sacrificed 
the "supple skin," and in place of "found pleasure" 
{se plaisaient) in tender touching, he used the stronger 
word "delighted" {se delectaient). He renounced in 
the end the ridiculous idea of the tickling of the worms 
of the tomb: and, with a single phrase — "so rapid 
formerly when she ran to the satisfaction of her de- 
sires" — he replaced the rather stupid "which had 
carried her to her assignations and tramped the street 
pavement." 

In Rouen ana the country about Rouen Maupassant 



226 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

also has a share. A few miles to the west of the city, 
on the road to Havre, is the village of Canteleu, with 
its chateau built by Mansart. It was there, in "Bel- 
Ami," that Georges Duroy took his bride, who had been 
Madeleine Forestier, to visit his parents, coarse old 
peasants who kept a cabaret. Humble as was this 
home of early youth, it was turned to account in the 
subsequent days of Bel-Ami's prosperity, when, at 
Madeleine's suggestion, he pushed himself into society 
under the name of George Du Roy de Cantel. The 
story of "Boule-de-Suif" opens in Rouen with the 
picture of the stage-coach and its ill-assorted passengers 
starting on the wintry journey during the Franco- 
Prussian War. The city is also the scene of several 
of his shorter tales, conspicuous among them "Le Lit 
29"; while, to come down to more recent fiction, in 
Rouen happened a certain episode that is not likely 
to have been forgotten by any one who has read Leon- 
ard Merrick's "Conrad in Quest of His Youth." In 
later years Conrad was to learn in life's school the lesson 
that "there is no road back to Rouen." 




WALLS OF CARCASSONNE 

XV. A ROUNDABOUT CHAPTER 

Carcassonne — The Land of the Fading Twilight — "Made- 
moiselle de Maupin" — " Manon LescaiU" — With Balzac iji 
Touraine — The Home of Eugenie Grandet — The Country of 
Scott's "Quentin Durward" — About France with the "Coniedie 
Humaine" — Concarneau and Blanche Willis Howards' s 
"Guenn" — Loti's " Pecheur d'Islande"- — Belle-Isle-en-Mer and 
the Death of Porthos — Indret and Daudefs '^ Jack." 




^HERE is a material Carcassonne of which the 
Pilgrim retains the memory of fugitive glimpses 
caught in swift passage in the spring of 1917. 
Conventional guide books refer the traveller to such 
points of interest as the Place Carnot, with its fine 

227 



228 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

plane trees and its eighteenth-century fountain, to the 
Square Gambetta and its sculptures, and convey useful 
information about hotel rates and cab fares. But in 
the pleasanter world of the imagination the Carcassone 
of actual fact and municipal regulations which ten 
years ago was the centre of disturbance among French 
wine-growers, is the make-believe Carcassonne. The 
real city is the one of the peasant of Gustave Nadaud's 
poem, to whom Carcassonne was always in the distance, 
always in the beyond, always in the Land of the Fading 
Twilight. 

I'm growing old, I've sixty years, 

I've laboured all my life in vain; 
In all that time of hopes and fears 

I've failed my dearest wish to gain; 
I see full well that here below 

Bliss unalloyed there is for none. 
My prayer will ne'er fulfilment know; 

I never have seen Carcassonne, 

I never have seen Carcassonne. 

You see the city from the hill — 
It lies beyond the mountains blue, 

And yet to reach it one must still 
Five long and weary leagues pursue, 

And to return, as many morel 

Ah! had the vintage plenteous grown, 

The grape withheld its yellow store, — 
I shall not look on Carcassonne, 
I shall not look on Carcassonne. 

There are other towns in France than Carcassonne 
that belong to the Land of the Fading Twilight, as 
there are rivers, and mystic pools, and valleys and 



A ROUNDABOUT CHAPTER 



229 



forests. To that Shadow Land belong the scenes of 
Gautier's "Mademoiselle de Maupin" and the "Paul 
et Virginie" of Bernardin de Saint- Pierre, and the 
"ManonLescaut"of the Abbe Prevost. It matters little 
that there was a very definite setting for the last-named 
story, and that, until 
a dozen years ago, 
there still stood near 
the Pont Neuf of 
Paris some of the old 
walls of the Auberge 
du Cheval-Blanc, 
where Manon im- 
patiently pushed open 
the door of the coach 
and sprang to the 
cobble-stoned court. 
In a book of that 
kind it is the vague 
uncertainty that 
fascinates; the proper 
home for Manon is 
an edifice that never 
had tangible existence just as for Mrs. Rawdon Craw- 
ley, nee Rebecca Sharp, we demand a very definite 
structure in Curzon Street, Park Lane, London, and for 
the Maison Vauquer of "Pere Goriot," the actual 
building to be found at No. 24 Rue Tournefort, 
Paris. 

Ah, that Land of the Fading Twilight! that border- 
land of night and day, of reality and myth! The scenes 




THE OLD CHEVAL-BLANC 



230 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

of "As You Like It," and the "Midsummer Night's 
Dream," belong there, and of "Mademoiselle de Mau- 
pin," and, best of all, "The Pilgrim's Progress." The 
attempt has been made to identify certain descriptions 
of "The Pilgrim's Progress" with villages of Bedford- 
shire. They tell us that the book is a wonderful alle- 
gory; that Giant Pope is a prodigious dig at Rome; 
that the volume should be read in a studious, thoughtful, 
reverent frame of mind. Perhaps it should. But most 
of us will confess to liking it best as a romance, and to 
thinking of the son of the Bedford tinker as one of the 
great amusers. There are any number of apparently 
inextricable situations; plenty of stout blows; the 
narrative has all the contrivances of stirring fiction. 
Greatheart is every bit as delightful as the Count of 
Monte Cristo and possesses the same omniscience and 
omnipotence. In finding, in this Land of the Fading 
Twilight, men and motives; in making it the scene of 
action and passion; the romantic quality, while a factor, 
is not enough. In the tales of Dumas or of Scott, for 
example, the scene of action is a sphere distinctly our 
own. Brian de Bois Guilbert, Ivanhoe, Quentin Dur- 
ward, Le Balafre, no matter who the character or what 
the historical period, people the world of men and things 
tangible; D'Artagnan struts the streets of old Paris, 
his rapier half out of its scabbard; his dexterity, his 
unflagging spirits, his dash, amaze and delight; but he 
is above all a human being, and the environment in 
which he moves to the full as material as our own. 

On the other hand, in "Manon Lescaut," or "Ma- 
demoiselle de Maupin," or the Carcassonne which the 



A ROUNDABOUT CHAPTER 231 

old peasant knew, or "The Pilgrim's Progress," the 
landscape is a mirage. The reader feels the unsub- 
stantiality of the hills, valleys, and cities described, and 
admiring the beauty of an ivy-covered turret or wall, 
knows them to be illusory vapours that would yield at 
the touch. Of such substance are the Valley of the 
Shadow of Death; Doubting Castle, where Giant De- 
spair's head was hewn from his shoulders; the Vale of 
Humiliation, where Christian played the man — who 
cares what the names may mean or what the purport 
of the moral lesson? Of all the corners of that land 
of the Fading Twilight, as^ we roam through it in 
fancy, the Valley of the Shadow of Death of the Bunyan 
tale is the strangest and weirdest. Sunlight does not 
penetrate there. Beyond the gloomy entrance of the 
Valley everlasting hills roll away until the last summits 
are lost in mist. The air is heavy with a brooding si- 
lence. It is the land of Poe's "Ulalume," of ashen 
skies, "the misty mid-region of Weir," "the ghoul- 
haunted woodland of Weir." There are waters — dead 
waters— the dim, dark tarn of Auber. But that is only 
a comer of the region of dreams. In the Land of the 
FadingTwilight there are brightness and beauty. White 
chateaux are seen through spacious avenues of trees. 
The air is ever fragrant with the sweetness of an early 
morning in June. Strangely green and dew-kissed 
are herbage and foliage. Such is the country to which 
belong "Mademoiselle de Maupin" and "Manon Les- 
caut." So no more of the Land of the Fading 
Twilight. 
This is a roundabout chapter, designed to invade 



232 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Touraine, Brittany, and adjacent provinces. In the 
ancient city of Tours the great Balzac was born, and to 
the city and the country surrounding he returned often 
in person, and oftener in the pages of the "Comedie 
Humaine." Touraine was the background of many of 
the sly tales that go to make up "Les Contes Drola- 
tiques," of "Le Cure de Tours," of "La Lys dans la 
Vallee," of "Gaudissart," of "La Grande Breteche," a 
story curiously paralleled in Poe's "The Cask of Amon- 
tillado'* and in Conan Doyle's "The New Catacomb"; 
and, above all, of "Eugenie Grandet." With the pop- 
ular estimate of "Eugenie Grandet," which appeared 
in 1833, the same year as "Le Medecin de Campagne," 
Balzac was only half in sympathy. Astonished by the 
storm of enthusiasm raised by the book and always 
grumbling at the lack of response to most of his works, 
he protested jealously: "Those who call me the father 
of 'Eugenie Grandet' wish to belittle me. It is a 
masterpiece, I know, but it is a little masterpiece; they 
are very careful not to mention the great ones." 

Associated with the memory of Eugenie Grandet, at 
Avoine Beaumont, near Tours, is the Chateau de Velors. 
The chateau was at one time a hunting lodge of Charles 
VII. It passed eventually by fraud into the possession 
of Pere Nivelau so that it became the home of his daugh- 
ter Eugenie. Balzac lived in Tours at that time and is 
said to have fallen in love with the daughter but to have 
been refused by old Nivelau on account of his poverty. 
The story, according to a later owner, the Marquise de 
Podestad, followed the facts very closely, excepting that 
Eugenie's marriage was more actively unhappy than 



A ROUNDABOUT CHAPTER 



233 



the novel represented it, and lasted long years instead 
of a few months. There were also several children, 
whereas in the story there were none, but the real Eu- 
genie outlived them all, and died in the early 'nineties 
of the last century. The Marquise de Podestad had 
many of Eugenie's belongings, including the crucifix 
at which old Grandet 
clutched when he was 
dying, because it was 
gilded. In later years 
the chateau has been 
surrounded by a moat 
filled with water of 
which there was no 
mention in the tale. 
Balzac wrote: "That 
cold, sunless, dreary 
house, always over- 
shadowed by the dark 
ramparts, is like her 
own life." 

The illustrious 

Gaudissart, sublimation 

Balzac knew the type. 




EUGENIE GRANDET S HOME 



of the commis'Voyageur as 
stopped, when in Tours, at 
the Faisan, and when in the smaller town of Vouvray, 
seven miles away on the Loire, at the Soleil d'Or. All 
traces of those old inns have probably vanished. 
The scene of the story "La Grande Breteche'* was 
described as an old, high-roofed, isolated brown 
house that stood on the banks of the Loire, about a 
hundred paces from Vendome. In the very shadow 



234 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

of the Cathedral of Saint-Gatiens in Tours, an edifice of 
which the beginnings date from the twelfth century, 
began *'Le Cure de Tours." The Abbe Birotteau was 
overtaken by a shower as he was returning from the 
house where he had passed the evening, and therefore 
walked as fast as his corpulence would permit across 
the little square. Directly north of the cathedral 
lived Birotteau, and a visitor, contemplating a search 
for the exact structure, may find suggestion in a passage 
which shows Balzac's care in the setting of the scene no 
matter whether the story was laid in Paris or in a pro- 
vincial town. 

Situated on the northern side of Saint-Gatiens, the house in ques- 
tion is always in the shadow of that noble cathedral, upon which 
time has thrown its cloak of black, imprinted its seams, and sown 
its chill dampness, its moss, and its tall dark grass. And so the 
house is always wrapped in profound silence, interrupted only by 
the clanging of the bells, by the music of the services that is audible 
through the walls of the church, or by the cawings of the jackdaws 
whose nests are in the high towers. The spot is a desert of stone, a 
solitude full of character, which can be inhabited only by beings in 
whom intelligence is utterly lacking, or who are blessed _with pro- 
digious strength of mind. 

The neighbourhood of Tours is the Balzac country, 
and it is also the Scott country by virtue of "Quentin 
Durward," for less than two miles from the city are 
the remains of the Chateau Plessis-les-Tours. On a 
near-by river bank, one summer morning in the fifteenth 
century, the young traveller from the Highland moors, 
later to be enrolled as an archer in the Scottish Guard, 



A ROUNDABOUT CHAPTER 235 

fell in with the disagreeable old merchant whom he 
afterward found to be King Louis the Eleventh of 
France. Scott himself has told the story of how the 
land seized upon him as an historical background that 
demanded expression by his pen, and of his French host 
of the banks of the Loire, who, quite ignorant of the 
identity of his distinguished guest, spoke of a certain 
personage as reminding him at times "of a character 
in the 'Bridle of Lammermoor,' which you must have 
read, as it is the work of one of your gens de lettres, quon 
appelUy je crois, le Chevalier Scott."'* Leaving the 
Chateau Plessis-les-Tours to conduct the ladies en- 
trusted to his care by the king, Quentin was quickly 
overtaken by the helmeted knights, and in the ensuing 
combat overthrew the Duke of Orleans, and gallantly 
exchanged blows with the mighty Dunois. To quote 
Du Manner's "Peter Ibbetson," it was "a land were 
Quentin Durward, happy squire of dames, rode mid- 
nightly by their side through the gibbet and gipsy- 
haunted forests of Touraine." 

Some thirty miles from Tours is Loches, with its 
famous castle, surrounded by a wall and moat, most of 
which still remains. The thoughts of Quentin Dur- 
ward, riding on after the encounter, were of the castle 
to which his pursuers had been condemned, the place 
of terror with dungeons under dungeons, some of them 
unknown even to the keepers themselves; living graves, 

*Sir Walter's host's delighted belief in the "Bridle of Lammermoor" as 
being the correct equivalent suggests such a similar gem of translation as 
"The Missing String" for "The Lost Chord," and among English char- 
acters of French fiction the Lord Boulgrog of Paul de Keck and the Tom 
Jim-Jack of Victor Hugo. 



236 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

to which men were consigned, with little hope of further 
employment during the rest of life, than to breathe 
impure air and to feed on bread and water; of the dread- 
ful places of confinement called cages, in which the 
wretched prisoner could neither stand upright nor 
stretch himself at length. These cages, which Louis 
amused himself by inventing, and the manufacture of 
which he watched with grim pleasure in the three forges 
he established in the castle, were sometimes made of 
iron, and sometimes of wood covered with sheets of iron 
both inside and out, seven to eight feet long and about 
the same in height as a rule, though some were much 
smaller. Historians have found references to at least 
nine distinct cages de fer, but probably a very much 
larger number existed at one time. About the time 
that Sir Walter Scott was planning on the scene the 
writing of "Quentin Durward" he was probably en- 
countering at every turn compatriots of both sexes, 
for according to Balzac, the English about that time 
began to appreciate Touraine, and descended upon the 
province 'Mike a cloud of grasshoppers." In the gen- 
eral tribute to the charm of this section of France there 
was one discordant note; that of Stendhal, who, in his 
*'Memoires d'un Touriste," recorded: ^'la belle Tour- 
aine nexiste pas." 

To almost every corner of his country Balzac went 
for the scenes of his studies of provincial life. Mention 
has been made of the books dealing with Touraine, 
using the name in its elastic and indefinite sense. The 
region about Grenoble in southeastern France is de- 
scribed in **Le Medecin de Campagne." To the city of 




237 



238 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Angouleme belongs the first part of "Illusions Perdues." 
Bordeaux appears in "Le Contrat de Manage," and 
Limoges in "Le Cure de Village." Lower Normandy 
is in "La Femme Abandonnee," "Las Rivalites," 
and "L'Erifant Maudit"; northeastern France in 
"Pierrette," "Ursule Mirouet," "Les Paysans," and 
"Une Teneb reuse Affaire." To Brittany we turn for 
the associations of "Les Chouans," which in the form 
in which it originally appeared bore the title "Le Der- 
nier Chouan ou La Bretagne en 1800," and to "Bea- 
trix," which is interesting not only for itself but also 
for its leading character. Mademoiselle des Touches, 
easily to be recognized as George Sand. 

Now and again in Brittany the literary Pilgrim strikes 
the American trail. Thirty-five years ago Blanche 
WiUis Howard wrote "Guenn; a Wave on the Breton 
Coast," which became one of the most popular books 
of the day. "Plouvenec," the ancient town of the tale, 
with its one irregular street of crowded houses, con- 
nected with the modern village only by a drawbridge, 
its fortress, that had known more than five centuries 
of history, and had been besieged, occupied, and en- 
riched in memories by such doughty warriors as Du 
Guesclin and De Rohan, has been generally recognized 
as the Concarneau of fact, although the present Pil- 
grim, recalling Concarneau as he saw it some years after 
the story was written, and comparing the memory with 
the text, fancies many discrepancies. Yet probability 
favours the general belief, for Concarneau has long 
been a resort particularly frequented by American 
artists. As in the tale, the ancient quarter of the town, 



A ROUNDABOUT CHAPTER 239 

the Fille-Close, lies upon an island surrounded by ram- 
parts. "Nevin," where Guenn danced at the Breton 
Pardon, is very likely to be Pont-Aven, that lies a few 
miles to the east, and Les Glenan may be identified 
with the Lannions. Another novel of the Breton coast 
of American origin is Marie Louise Van Saanen's 
"Anne of Treboul," Treboul being a town of actual 
existence. 

For a vivid picture of the rugged Breton landscape 
one may turn to Guy de Maupassant's "Un Fils"; and 
there is Paimpol, reached by a little spur line from 
Guimgamp, which is to the French boats engaged in 
the cod-fishery off Newfoundland and Iceland what 
Gloucester is to the American boats, and where the 
annual departure in February of the "pecheurs d'ls- 
lande" is the occasion of a famous festival. Pierre 
Loti has charmingly described Paimpol and its life in 
"Pecheur d'Islande." There are Breton scenes in 
Victor Hugo's "Quatre-Vingt-Treize," and if one makes 
the sea trip to the Channel Islands no association of 
fiction is likely to be more intimate than that of the 
battle between man and devil fish described in *'Les 
Travailleurs de la Mer." If the traveller happens to 
pass through Vannes he will recall, when confronted by 
the cathedral of Saint-Pierre, that a certain Monsieur 
d'Herblay, once a Musketeer of King Louis XIII, under 
the sword name of Aramis, became, in his later years, 
the Bishop of Vannes; while if the present Pilgrim ever 
happens to be at Quiberon, he is going to make the trip 
by boat to Belle-Isle-en-Mer, not for the purpose of see- 
ing the villa of Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, but of hunting 



240 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

a grotto worthy of being the scene of the conflict in 
which Porthos died hke a Titan. 

A few miles from Nantes is Indret, with its extensive 
marine engine works. It was there that Alphonse 
Daudet laid the scenes of some of the most poignant 
chapters of "Jack." Daudet, in his reminiscences, has 
told that the whole episode of Indret was imaginary. 
He needed a great centre of the iron-working industry; 
he hesitated between Creuzot and Indret. Finally he 
decided in favour of the latter because of the river life, 
the Loire, and the Port of Saint-Nazaire. It occa- 
sioned a journey and many short trips during the sum- 
mer of 1874. Taking in spirit with him the pathetic 
little son of Ida de Bsnancy ySoi-disant actress, the novel- 
ist set about becoming familiar with the atmosphere, 
the class of people among whom his hero's life was to 
be passed. He spent many long hours on the island of 
Indret, walked through the enormous shops during work- 
ing hours and in the more impressive periods of repose. 
He saw the Roudis' house with its little garden; 
he went up and down the Loire, from Saint-Nazaire 
to Nantes, on a boat which rolled and seemed tipsy 
like its old rower, who was much surprised that Daudet 
had not preferred to take the Basse-Indre railway or the 
Paimboeuf steamer. And the harbour, the trans- 
atlantic liners, the engine rooms, which he inspected in 
detail, furnished him with the real notes for his study. 




KING rent's castle 



XVI. A PILGRIMAGE TO TARTARIN* 

The Rails of the P.-L.-M. — Jt the " Empereurs'* — Streets of 
Tar as con — The Baobab Villa — The Castle of King Rene — The 
Bridge to Beaucaire — The Writing of " Tartarin de Tarascon." 



*This chapter is based largely on an article written by the Pilgrim many 
years ago, and originally appearing in the Bookman for October, 1901. In 
the previous July, being in Paris, he decided that he would visit the lair of 
Alphonse Daudet's immortal lion-slayer and Alpine climber. The first im- 
pressions were written in the quaint Proven9al inn that bore the sonorous 
name of "Hotel des Empereurs" — perhaps it was "Grand Hotel des Empe- 
reurs" — and, in the Esplanade, on cafe tables that must once have been 
banged by the illustrious fist of Tartarin himself. Having absorbed the flavour 
of Tarascon, paid due respects to the "Tarasque," investigated every little 
alley leading to the Rhone, peered into the castle of King Rene, erstwhile 
habitation of the Montenegrin prince, and paced reverently the bridge to 
Beaucaire, the Pilgrim followed the Tartarian trail farther, first to Mar- 
seilles, and thence, by French tramp steamer on which he was the only pas- 
senger, across the Mediterranean to the land of the "Teurs." Since then 
he has twice caught glimpses of Tarascon, the last time being in May, 1917. 
But he feels that, with certain changes, the old story, written white-hot, 
should stand. 

241 



242 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Tarascon, July lO, igoi. 

It has been a day of heat and dust. As the vesti- 
buled rapide of the P.-L.-M. drew away from the 
southern fortifications, and flung itself out toward the 
Foret de Fontainebleau, the fog and haze of the morning 
Hfted, and the sun came out and blazed obliquely 
down. In a little while the hot dust was filtering 
through the windows, parching the throat; the eye 
became tired of watching the changing panorama of 
little hills and valleys, villages and rivers; and even 
the jokes and the gaudy cartoons of the French comic 
papers began to pall. The white ticket In pocket read 
''Tarascon"; and the books on the seat — thrown by 
prophetic chance Into the already groaning suit case 
at the very moment of departure, and brought over the 
Atlantic — told of one Tartarin of that place, and soon, 
as the train clattered on through the dust, the rails 
beneath began singing their rhythmical song about 
"Tartarin de Tarascon! Tartarin de Tarascon! Tar- 
tarin de Tarascon!" 

If the heat and whirling dust parched the throat, 
there was, at least, some consolation when the train 
slackened its speed and drew Into a station, and the 
guard droned his cinq minutes d'arretf, and a white- 
aproned waiter wheeled up alongside the carriage win- 
dows a white-spread table gleaming with amber bocks. 
Only there were 860-odd kilometres to be covered, and 
twelve hours in which to do it, and those pleasant 
little oases were sadly infrequent. Midday: the 
sun blazing more furiously than ever — the dust swirl- 
ing in great gusts. At Dijon there was temporary 



A PILGRIMAGE TO TARTARIN 243 

balm, and then the train wound screaming among the 
vineyards of the golden hillsides. In July heat and 
discomfort the afternoon wore along. Lyons was left 
behind, and soon, from the window of the lurching train, 
we were looking out on the valley of the Rhone, and the 
river itself, flanked by the pretty, pleasant Provence 
hills. Then gradually the dusk came down, deepening 
into night, and of Avignon could be seen only the lights 
and the outlines of the housetops. Within, the oil 
lamps overhead shone dimly, blickerlng in the draught; 
the eyes grew drowsy, and the head began to nod. 
Then, a perceptible slackening of speed, the whine of 
the brakes, and — "Tarascon! Tarascon! Tarascon!" 
/ am about to descend steps made immortal by Tartarin 
and his faithful camel! 

Tarascofi^ July iiy igbi. 
Sleep here in the "Empereurs" has been a restless 
one, broken by the baying, howling, yelping, of all the 
dogs in the world. Before turning out the light I re- 
read the last chapter of *' Tartarin de Tarascon," for its 
story of the return of Tartarin from Algeria, and its 
association with the flight of stone steps by which one 
descends from the railway station to the street below. 
You will remember the last episodes of the adventures 
among the lions, the mishap in this aff'air with the Prince 
of Montenegro, the discovery of Baya's infidelities, the 
defiance of the East from the Oratory of the Mosque, 
the pathetic return to France with Captain Barbassou 
on the steamship Zouave. The Lion of Tarascon is 
plucked to the last feather, overwhelmed with shame 



244 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

and humiliation. He slinks Into a railway carriage at 
Marseilles, hoping to steal to his home In the Baobab 
Villa silently and undiscovered. Then, as the train 
speeds on, there looms into sight the pathetic figure of 
the deserted camel, the sharer and witness of all his 
Algerian misfortunes. Tarascon is reached. Down 
the station steps Tartarin stumbles. Then, the great 
cry: "Long Hfe to Tartarin, the Lion-Slayer!" He 
feels that death has come; he believes it a hoax. But 
no, there Is all Tarascon waving Its hats. He is tossed 
aloft and carried in triumph. The hide of the blind 
lion sent to the brave Commandant Bravlda has been 
magnified by the splendid sun of Tarascon Into a herd 
of lions of which Tartarin has made marmalade. The 
appearance of the camel gives the final touch. For an 
instant Tarascon believes that Its dragon, its "Tar- 
asque,'* has come again. Tartarin sets his fellow- 
citizens at ease. "This Is my camel," he says. "It 
Is a noble beast. It saw me kill all my lions." 

Whereupon he familiarly takes the arm of the com- 
mandant, who is red with pleasure; and, followed by his 
camel, surrounded by the cap-hunters, acclaimed by 
all the population, he placidly proceeds toward the Bao- 
bab Villa, and, on the march, thus commences the ac- 
count of his mighty hunting: "You are to imagine, of 
an evening, out In the depths of the Sahara"! 

Tarascon^ July I2y igoi. 
Tarasconian hospltahty has to offer to the visitor 
within the city gates two or three little inns built of 
stone and stucco — relics, perhaps, not of remote cen- 



A PILGRIMAGE TO TARTARIN 245 

turies, but certainly of days long before the town be- 
came immortal through the exploits of her lion-slayer. 
The one in which I am staying is known as the **Em- 
pereurs." I don't think that the name in any sense 
indicates political partisanship. But it sounds; it 
sounds, in its rolling of the *'rs." Had there been in 
the vocabulary or in the sun-inflamed imagination of 
the Tarasconese a title more sonorous, more magnifi- 
cent, more magniloquent, it probably would have been 
something else. But I am a guest at the "Empereurs." 
It is a tiny French inn of a type so common here in the 
little towns of Provence, that, looking about in the salle- 
d-manger it requires very little fancy to picture the 
city's Great Man dining in state, attended by Bompard, 
and Bravida, and Pascalon, and even the insidious, 
envious, and jaundiced Costecalde, and all the rest of 
the merry company of cap-poppers, and Alpinists, and 
colonists. 

Tarascon is a pretty white town of nine thousand 
inhabitants, situated on the banks of the Rhone, some 
fifteen or eighteen leagues to the north of the Mediter- 
ranean. Not far away is Avignon, where once upon a 
time a Pope used to sit in state and rivalry to another 
Pope in Rome; and a few miles to the west is Nimes, 
with its splendid Roman amphitheatre. Yonder, on 
the horizon, are the hills, the little Alps of Provence, 
that fired Tartarin to his conquest of the Jungfrau. 
Over those hills Alphonse Daudet and his brother 
tramped as boys, loitering on the pleasant banks of the 
Rhone, listening to the music of the country fairs, and 
watching the steps of the farandole. 



246 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Round the city of Tartarin there runs a wide street, 
shaded by trees, and lined by shops and cafes. Here 
and there over a shop is the sign: "Chez Tartarin" — 
evidence that the town is not entirely unconscious of 
the source of her glory. This broad street is known as 
the Esplanade. It was here that Tartarin trained him- 
self to the hardships of his Algerian enterprise, making 
the complete circuit, at double step, six or seven times 
of a morning. After one has made the tour hallowed 
by his footsteps the feat does not seem so astonishing. 
The town within the Esplanade is a labyrinth of narrow, 
winding alleys. Here and there, in front of some mu- 
nicipal building, there is a tiny, open space, dignified by 
the name of square. In itself Tarascon is simply a town 
of Provence, amazingly quaint of course to American 
eyes, but distinguished from other towns of this comer 
of the world chiefly on account of its associations with 
the fame of Tartarin. Here, at the end of the Rue des 
Martyrs, a street which seems to have remained practi- 
cally unchanged since the fifteenth century, is the Hotel 
de Ville, where the sacred effigy of *'La Tarasque" is 
kept. Here also was held the famous trial described 
in later chapters of "Port Tarascon." 

What a scene that is! The heated court room, the 
impassioned harangue of the public prosecutor, the 
excited populace, the procession of witnesses contra- 
dicting one another and attesting one another's deaths, 
and, above all, Tartarin, serene in misfortune, firm in 
the conviction of his own innocence, suddenly rising 
and exclaiming with uplifted hand: "Before God and 
man I swear that I never wrote that letter": then, on 



A PILGRIMAGE TO TARTARIN 247 

examining the document more closely, continuing simply : 
"True, that is my writing. The letter is from me, but 
I had forgotten it." 

I have been hunting for the Baobab Villa, and if the 
films in the camera develop happily they will carry 
home the story of my complete success. In the first 
chapter of "Tartarin de Tarascon" Daudet gave very 
specific directions. The home of Tartarin was at the 
entrance of the town, the third house, left-hand side, 
on the road to Avignon; a pretty little Tarasconese villa, 
garden before, balcony behind, very white walls, green 
blinds, and on the steps of the gate a brood of little 
Savoyards playing at hop-scotch or sleeping in the 
blessed sun with their heads on their shoe-blacking 
boxes. Lacking all trace of the Savoyards there is 
a house as described in the place indicated. It is of no 
particular importance that, somevv-here in one of his 
reminiscences, Daudet told us that the Baobab Villa 
was, in reality, some leagues farther south and on 
the other side of the Rhone. To the end of my days 
I shall retain the profound and unshakable conviction 
that my house was the house of Tartarin. 

At one point of the Esplanade a road, short and 
narrow, leads to the Beaucaire bridge, passing the old 
castle of King Rene, in modern times used as a prison 
flanked by its four towers. Literature in the reading 
room of the "Empereurs" supplies the information 
that the edifice dates from the fourteenth or fifteenth 
century and was built and occupied by King Rene 
of Anjou. As if that were of either interest or import- 
ance! What really counts is that in this feudal strong- 



248 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

hold, washed by the waters of the Rhone, Tartarin was 
kept a prisoner in the dark days of his downfall; and 
that it Was here also that his friend of the native quarter 
of Algiers and of the night watch in the copse of oleand- 
ers, the Prince of Montenegro, was lodged for three 
years at the expense of the State. You remember how 
it puzzled Tartarin that the Prince knew only one side 
of Tarascon. That, of course, happened to be the side 
visible from the jail windows. *'I went out but Httle," 
said his Highness. "And Tartarin was discreetly 
afraid to question him further. All great existences 
have mysterious sides." 

It was with no lightness of heart that, standing in the 
middle of the long bridge that spans the Rhone con- 
necting Tarascon with Beaucaire, I recalled the last 




TARTARIN, ADIEU ! 



recorded crossing of Tartarin and the wave of sad 
farewell. When that time comes, at the end of "Port 
Tarascon," there is no galejade on the lips. Master 
of pathos as he was in such books as "Jack" and 
"Fromont et Risler" Daudet never tugged more poig- 
nantly at the heart's strings than in that picture of the 



A PILGRIMAGE TO TARTARIN 249 

Lion of Tarascon, shorn of his glory, crossing the bridge 
to die of a broken heart in exile in Beaucaire. 



Once, looking toward the Castle of Beaucaire, at the top, quite 
at the top, I thought I could distinguish someone levelling a spy- 
glass at Tarascon. He had a look like Bompard. He disappeared 
into the tower, and then came back with — another man, very stout, 
who seemed to be Tartarin. This one took the spy-glass, looked 
through it, and then dropped it, to make a sign with his arms as if 
of recognition; he was so far off, so small, so vague. 

Tartarin of Tarascon had looked for the last time 
upon his kingdom. 

II 

Daudet himself has told the story of the writing of 
"Tartarin de Tarascon " in the *' History of My Books." 
Perhaps the first idea came at the time of the journey 
to Algeria in 1 861-2. But the tale was not written 
until seven years later. It first appeared as a serial 
in the Petit Moniteur Universe!, where it was a complete 
failure. The paper was a popular one and its readers 
had no comprehension of printed sarcasm. Some 
stopped their subscriptions and others resorted to per- 
sonal insult. One man wrote the author: "Ah! indeed 
— what does that prove.'' Imbecile!" and fiercely signed 
his name. After ten or twelve instalments Daudet 
took the story to the Figaro, where it was better un- 
derstood, but came in conflict with other animosities. 
The secretary of the paper's editorial staff was devoted 
to Algeria, and the light way in which Daudet had 
written about the colony exasperated him. Not being 



250 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

able to prevent the publication of the story, he arranged 
to divide it up into intermittent fragments, on the 
excuse of "abundance of matter," with the result that 
most readers lost interest. 

Then came more trouble. In serial form the hero 
had been called Barbarin of Tarascon. In Tarascon 
there was an old family of Barbarins who threatened 
a law suit in case the name was not immediately 
changed. Daudet hastened to substitute Tartarin 
for Barbarin, but in the first edition of the book there 
are Barbarins and Tartarins. There were others in 
Tarascon, besides the famil\7 that felt itself directly 
lampooned, that found offence in the joyous tale. Even 
in later years there were natives of the little town who 
sought Daudet in Paris in the same belHgerent spirit 
with which the Irishman visited Thackeray. "It 
is something, I tell you," confessed Daudet, "to feel 
the hatred of a whole town on your shoulders. Even 
to this day, when I travel in the south, I am always ill 
at ease when I pass through Tarascon." 

But he was very proud, and justly so, of the creation 
for all that. Judged impartially, at a distance of some 
years, Tartarin, running his wild, unbridled course, 
seemed to him to possess the qualities of youth and hfe 
and truth — the truth of the country beyond the Loire, 
which inflates and exaggerates, never lies, and taras- 
conises all the time. "But," he said, "I confess that, 
great as is my love of style, of beautiful prose, melodious 
and highly coloured, in my opinion these should not be 
the novelist's only care. His real delight should con- 
sist in the creation of real persons, in establishing, by 



A PILGRIMAGE TO TARTARIN 251 

virtue of their verisimilitude, types of men and women 
who will go about henceforth through the world with 
the names, the gestures, the grimaces with which he has 
endowed them and which make people speak of them — • 
without reference to their creator and without mention- 
ing his name. For my part, my emotion is always the 
same, when I hear someone say of a person he has met 
in his daily life, of one of the innumerable puppets 
of the political comedy: "He is a Tartarin, a Monpavon 
— a Delobelle." At such times a thrill runs through 
me, the thrill of pride that a father feels, hidden in the 
crowd, when his son is being applauded, and all the time 
longing to cry out: "That is my boy." 




THE CHATEAU D IF 



XVII. MEDITERRANEAN WATERS 



Villemessant and Dantes's Escape — The Magic of Marseilles — 
Conrad's "The Arrow of Gold" — Dickens's " Little Dorrit" — 
Daudet's " Tartarin" and '' Sapho" — R. H. Davis and Mar- 
seilles — The Shadow of "Monte Cristo — The Cannebiere and the 
Catalan Quarter — The Chateau d'lf and Its Story — The Island 
of Monte-Cristo — The Real Edmond Dantes — Maquet's Share 
in Writing "Monte-Cristo" — Zola in Marseilles — Along the 
Riviera — De Maupassant and Cannes. 

ONE of the most conspicuous figures of French 
journaHsm of the nineteenth century was 
Henri Villemessant, the founder of the Paris 
Figaro. He left his own "Memoires d'un Journal- 
iste," and a score of his contemporaries have written 
of his peculiarities and his vigorous personahty. For 

252 



MEDITERRANEAN WATERS 253 

example, there is Alphonse Daudet's illuminating sketch 
in "Trente Ans de Paris." Villemessant, hardened 
veteran of a thousand bitter squabbles, was neither 
over emotional nor easily impressed. Yet one morning 
of the eighteen-forties he made his way home in the 
small hours with news that he was eager to impart. 
His wife was fast asleep, but he quickly shook her into 
consciousness. "My wife, I have something to tell 
you." "What is it?" "Edmond Dantes has just 
escaped from the Chateau d*If." It was as if it had 
been thirty years earlier, and the message had conveyed 
the information: "Bonaparte left the Island of Elba 
five days ago. He landed at Golfe Juan, and the south 
of France seems to be rallying to his banners." Vil- 
lemessant was merely a striking example. Thousands 
of other readers were equally agitated when the narra- 
tive of Alexandre Dumas's "The Count of Monte 
Cristo" reached the point where Dantes took the place 
in the burial sack of the dead Abbe Faria and was 
hurled from the rock into the sea. The story is also a 
story of Rome and of Paris. But in its epic aspect it 
belongs above all to Marseilles. 

Every writer of fiction who turns to Marseilles as a 
background may be relied upon, sooner or later, to 
introduce the old saying of the townspeople to the 
effect that if Paris had a Cannebiere it would be another 
Marseilles. It is a laughter-provoking saying, but one 
does not laugh in just the same way if one happens to 
know Marseilles. To introduce the personal note: 
When the Pilgrim first visited Marseilles many years 
ago he anticipated a kind of Mediterranean Liverpool. 



254 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

The train carrying him from the Tarascon of Tartarin 
entered the Saint-Charles Station. Without leaving the 
building he passed from the station into the Terminus 
Hotel of the same name. The attendant showing him 
to his room threw wide the windows and the Pilgrim 
looked out to gasp and gasp again. It is his good 
fortune to have known the Bay of Naples, to have 
seen the orange groves of Genoa in the sunshine of an 
Easter morning; to have basked in the loveliness of the 
Lake of Como; to have watched the sunrise from the 
Rigi-Kulm; to have been agitated by the mingled bitter- 
ness and joy of puppy love in the Castle of Chillon, 
where his mind should have been occupied by memories 
of Bonnivard and the Byronic poem; to have found in 
the spectacle of the Esterel and the lies de Lerins from 
the Croisette of Cannes — after months of Belgium under 
the Prussian yoke and an enforced journey through 
Germany watched by eyes of glaring hate — a peace and 
beauty that he had forgotten existed in the world. 
But looking backward he can recall no thrill just like 
the one stirred by the picture framed by the windows of 
the Saint-Charles: to the right, the splendid mountains; 
to the left, Notre-Dame de la Garde; and between, in the 
foreground, the Vieux Port, swarming with masts; and 
beyond, the dazzling bay, spotted with little islands, one 
of them crowned by the outlines of the Chateau d'If. 

Romance has ever felt, and probably ever will feel, 
the magic spell of Marseilles. Frank Norris said that 
there were in the United States only three "novel'* 
cities: New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. 
France has many "novel'* cities, but, excluding of 




The Vieiix Port of Marseilles. Joseph Conrad writing to-day of 
Marseilles in "The Arrow of Gold" is following in illustrious footsteps. 
Dumas 's "Monte Cristo," when the scene was in Marseilles and the 
Chateau d 'If, was an epic. The Vieux Port, reeking of the Seven Seas, 
calls compellingly to fiction. 



MEDITERRANEAN WATERS 255 

course Paris, none so stirring to the Imagination as 
Marseilles. Rare is the writer who knows it and who 
does not at some time turn it in some way into copy. 
Only yesterday it was Joseph Conrad with his "The 
Arrow of Gold." "Certain streets," he said at the 
beginning of that tale, "have an atmosphere of their 
own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affec- 
tion of their citizens. One of such streets is the Can- 
nebiere, and the jest: 'If Paris had a Canneblere it 
would be a little Marseilles' is the jocular expression of 
municipal pride. I, too, have been under the spell. 
For me it has been a street leading into the unknown. 
Take Robert Hichens's "The Garden of Allah" of a 
dozen years ago. In that tale even across the desert 
sands stretched the reminiscent shadow of Notre-Dame 
de la Garde. Guy de Maupassant pictured the laby- 
rinth of winding streets cresting the eminence to the 
west of the Vieux Port in his terrible story: "Le Port." 
In Marseilles were laid the scenes of certain chapters 
of Dickens's "Little Dorrit." Dickens first saw the 
city in 1844, just about the time that "Monte Cristo" 
was investing it with a lasting fame in fiction. The 
town of the story was the town of 1825. Marseilles is 
in the pages of Daudet. We can see it with the eyes 
of Tartarin, about to embark for the land of the lions, 
or with those of Jean Gaussin, of "Sapho," waiting for 
the coming of Fanny Legrand in the Hotel du Jeune 
Anarcharsis — there is a street of that name, hard by 
the Vieux Port — an old inn facing the harbour and 
open in the sunshine to the raucous cries of the sailor 
men and the strange odours of a hundred foreign ports. 



2s6 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

For Marseilles interpreted by an American of the 
lighter school of fiction we can turn to the late Richard 
Harding Davis. Davis's obvious affection for the city 
is the more striking for the reason that it is introduced 
in tales dealing with scenes laid thousands of miles 
away; for example, one of his very best short stories, 
*'The Consul," and the most finished of all his novels, 
"Captain MackHn." In the former tale, in order to 
emphasize old Marshall's pitiable plight in his wretched 
South American post, the author recalled the days of 
former glory when his hero was our Consul General at 
Marseilles, who there, in his official capacit}^, had been 
called upon to welcome Adelina Patti, then the young 
queen'of song. In the concluding chapter of *' Captain 
Macklin, " Royal, in his home on the banks of the Hud- 
son River, receives Laguerre's cablegram offering him 
a commission in the French service. Then, beyond 
the light of the candles, beyond the dull red curtains 
jealously drawn against the winter landscape, beyond 
even "the slight white figure with its crown of burnished 
copper," he saw the swarming harbour of Marseilles. 
He saw the swaggering Turcos in their scarlet breeches, 
the crowded troopships, and from every ship's mast the 
glorious tricolor of France; the flag that in ten short 
years had again risen, that was flying over advancing 
columns in China, in Africa, in Madagascar; over 
armies that were giving France, for Alsace-Lorraine, 
new and great colonies in every seaboard in the world. 

But dominating the fiction of Marseilles is the gigan- 
tic shadow of "The Count of Monte Cristo," which 
began on the 28th of February, 18 15, when the watch- 



MEDITERRANEAN WATERS 257 

man in the tower of Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled 
the arrival of the Pharaon from Smyrna, Trieste, and 
Naples. To-day, although the city has greatly changed, 
the visitor with the inclination may easily follow the 
main trails of the story. From the platform of Fort 
Saint-Jean he may watch incoming vessels as the specta- 
tors of 1 8 1 5 watched the approaching Pharaon. Dantes, 
landing at the Quai d'Orleans, now the Quai de la 
Fraternite, passed along the Cannebiere and the Rue 
Noailles, to his father's apartment in the Alices de 
Meilhan. These are all familiar streets of the modern 
city. Following the left or eastern bank of the Vieux 
Port the road leads along the Quai Rive Neuve and 
the Boulevard du Pharo to the quarter still known as 
**Les Catalans." At the circular Place des Catalans 
begins the Corniche Road. The section is one of 
the quaintest of all the quaint sections of Marseilles. 
It was the home of the lovely Mercedes, the betrothed 
of Dantes, the Madame de Morcerf of later years, and 
the mother of Albert. Prowling about this quarter 
in the winter of 191 2 the Pilgrim found an inn of great 
antiquity that answered to almost the last detail the 
description of "La Reserve," where Danglars and 
Fernand plotted evilly, and where was written, in dis- 
guised hand, the letter of denunciation to the procureur 
du roi. It was also the scene of the interrupted mar- 
riage feast. The home of Villefort adjoined the Palais 
de Justice, then, as now, facing the Place Monthyon, 
which may be roughly designated as being half way 
between the Cannebiere and the church of Notre-Dame 
de la Garde. 



2S8 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Apart from its significance as a factor in "Monte 
Cristo" the Chateau dTf is one of the pleasantest ex- 
cursions that is to be found in many thousand leagues 
of travel. The journey there, the stay, and the return 
consume just the right amount of time (the Pilgrim 
is speaking of conditions as he found them six or seven 
years ago and which may or may not have changed). 
The little boat from the Quai de la Fraternite requires 
not more than half an hour for the trip to the rock. 
Through the Vieux Port, to the right old Marseilles 
Vv^ith its mouldy houses and winding alleys, to the left 
the towering Notre-Dame de la Garde, under the Pont 
transbordeuTy and then between the Forts of Saint- 
Nicholas and Saint-Jean. The Ilot dTf is a triangle of 
barren rock surrounded by a rampart. The donjon 
is reached by a gangway that has replaced the ancient 
drawbridge. Lighted tapers enable the visitor to 
explore the cell of Faria and the cell with the legendary 
hole. The Pilgrim begs leave to quote from a little 
guide that he picked up on the Marseilles quays: 



En laissant de cote la legende d'Edmond Dantes et de Vabhe FariUf 
de nombreux fails historiques se rattachent au sinistre monument. 
Citons ■parmi les prisonniers de marque les Jreres Serres; I' Homme au 
Masque de Fer^ qui ny resta que feu de jours; le matelot Jean Paul, qui 
y sejourna ji" ans; Miraheau {1774.-75); Philippe Egalite; le Marquis 
de Riviere; huit des gardes d'honneur qui avaient complote la mart de 
Napoleon (l8ij); I'abbe Desmasures {1814); le commissaire Gobei, qui 
terrorisa Marseille sous le Premier Empire {i8is)'y Boissin, qui blessa 
le general Lagarde a Nimes; les revoltes de juin 184.8; 300 personnes 
designees pour passer devant les commissions mixte (i8^j);et enjin jij 
vaincus de la Commune de 1871, parmi lesquels leurs chefsy Gaston 



MEDITERRANEAN WATERS 259 

Cremieux, le general Pelissier, et Aug. Etienne. — Le corps de Kleher y 
fut depose 30 ans a son retour d'Egypte (1801). 



Apart from the legend of Edmond Dantes and the Abbe Faria 
there are a number of historical facts connected with the sinister 
monument. Among famous prisoners were the Serres brothers; the 
sailor, Jean Paul, who stayed there 31 years; the Man in the Iron 
Mask, who was there only a short time; Mirabeau (1774-75); 
Philippe Egalite; the Marquis de Rivieres; eight of the guards of 
honour who had plotted the death of Napoleon (1813); the Abbe 
Desmasures (1814); Gobet, who terrorized Marseilles under the 
First Empire; Boissin, who wounded General Lagarde at Nimes; 
the revolutionists of June, 1848; 300 persons selected for political 
examination in 1851; and 513 Communists of 1871, among them the 
leaders, Gaston Cremieux, General Pelissier, and Aug. Etienne. — 
The body of Kleber rested here for 30 years after being returned 
from Egypt in 1801. 

Dumas first saw the Island of Monte Cristo in 1842. 
He was on a tour in company with Prince Napoleon, 
a son of Jerome Bonaparte. In a small boat hired at 
Leghorn they visited Elba, and from there discerned 
in the distance a rock of sugarloaf shape standing out 
of the sea. It was Monte Cristo, and then and there 
Dumas announced his intention of giving the name to a 
future novel. Then, in Peuchet's "La Police Devoilee" 
he found, under the title of **The Diamond and the 
Vengeance, " the story of Fran9ois Picaud, long since 
forgotten for himself, but destined to immortality as 
the Edm'ond Dantes of romance. 

In 1807 Picaud, a journeyman cobbler, was be- 
trothed to Marguerite Vigoreux. On the eve of his 
marriage he was denounced as a spy by jealous rivals 



26o THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

and thrown secretly into prison where he remained for 
seven years. During his incarceration he acted as 
servant to a rich Milanese ecclesiastic who suggested 
the Abbe Faria. The churchman treated Picaud as a 
son, and dying in prison he bequeathed to him seven 
million francs on deposit in the Bank of Amsterdam, 
and told him of a hiding place in Italy where diamonds 
to the value of twelve hundred thousand francs and 
three millions of specie — consisting of English guineas, 
French louis d'or, Spanish quadruples, Venetian florins, 
and ducats of Milan — were concealed. 

When Picaud, who had been imprisoned under the 
name of Joseph Lucher, was freed after the fall of the 
Empire in 1814, he gathered together the treasure be- 
queathed to him and began to build plans for ven- 
geance on the men who had been the cause of his un- 
doing. Their names he did not know, but, disguised as 
an Italian priest, he found the least guilty of the con- 
spirators, and by means of the same story of the dia- 
mond which Dumas used in "Monte Cristo," elicited 
from him all the details of the plot. Loupain, the 
prime mover in the denouncement of seven years be- 
fore, had married Marguerite Vigoreux, prospered, 
and was the owner of one of the finest cafes in Paris. 
Unlike Dumas's hero, who set all Paris wild with curios- 
ity by his oriental extravagance, Picaud went to work 
humbly. He sought and obtained employment as a 
waiter in Loupain's establishment. Among his fellow- 
servants were Gervais Chaubard and Guilhem Solari, 
the two men who, with Loupain, were responsible for 
his years of suffering. Soon disaster began to fall upon 



MEDITERRANEAN WATERS 261 

the conspirators. One day Chaubard disappeared, 
and his body, pierced by a poniard, was found on the 
Pont des Arts. Loupain's family was disgraced. He 
himself was reduced to abject poverty and was finally 
stabbed to death by a masked man in the gardens of 
the Tuileries. Solari died in frightful convulsions 
from poison. Vengeance had been consummated, but 
retribution was about to fall upon the head of Picaud. 

When he was leaving the Tuileries Gardens after the 
assassination of Loupain he was seized and carried away 
to an abandoned quarry. There, in the darkness, his 
captor said: "Well, Picaud, what name are you passing 
under now? Are you still the priest Baldini, or the 
waiter Prosper? In your desire for vengeance you have 
sold yourself to the devil. Ten years have been devoted 
to the pursuit of three creatures you should have spared. 
You have dragged me down to perdition. The dia- 
mond by which you bribed me was my undoing. I 
killed him who cheated me. I was arrested, condemned 
to the galleys, and for years dragged the ball and chain. 
Making my escape my one thought was to reach and 
punish the priest Baldini, You are in my power. 
Do you recognize me? I am Antoine Allut. How 
much will you pay for bread and water?" 

**I have no money." 

"You have sixteen milHons, " replied the captor, who 
went on to enumerate with overwhelming accuracy 
the list of his victim's investments, "these are my condi- 
tions. I will give you something to eat twice a day, 
but for each meal you must pay me twenty-five thou- 
sand francs." 



262 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

The prisoner's cupidity proved stronger than his 
hunger. He underwent such acute suffering without 
yielding that his captor saw that he had gone too far, 
and at last aroused to fury by this persistent obstinacy 
he threw himself upon Picaud and stabbed him to death. 

Crude as the tale is it is "The Count of Monte Cristo" 
in outline. Picaud is Dantes. The Abbe Baldini the 
Abbe Busini. Marguerite is Mercedes. Loupain is 
Fernand. Antoine Allut is Caderousse. Finally the 
end of the tale suggests the method by which Monte 
Cristo wrung from Danglars the stolen millions in the 
cave of Luigi Vampa. But considering the story from 
every side one must not overlook the part played by 
Dumas's chief collaborator Auguste Maquet. The 
story as originally planned by Dumas was to have begun 
in Rome with the adventures involving the Count of 
Monte Cristo, Albert de Morcerf, Franz d'Epinay, and 
Luigi Vampa and his bandits. Thence the tale was to 
have shifted to Paris and the development of the ven- 
geance. The history of Dantes's youth was to have 
been brought in by way of narration. In fact, the 
Roman chapters had been written when Maquet's 
advice was enlisted. It was he who pointed out that 
the early part — Marseilles, the Chateau dTf, the 
communicating dungeons, and the Abbe Faria — was the 
most interesting period of the hero's life. Dumas was 
persuaded, and in order to ensure an accuracy for which 
the literary Pilgrim of to-day, following the trail, has 
reason to be grateful, he journeyed south in order to 
refresh his memory of the streets of Marseilles, and the 
physical aspect of the Chateau d'If. It was probably 



MEDITERRANEAN WATERS 263 

Maquet's most important contribution to the fame of 
the "Maison Alexandre Dumas et Cie." He was the 
unwearied rummager of documents. Dumas without 
Maquet would still have been Dumas; whereas Maquet 
without Dumas, as was proven when he tried to play a 
lone hand, would have been nobody. And that despite 
the story that Dumas, his attention called to an his- 
torical error in the "Chevalier d'Harmenthal," ex- 
claimed: "The devil! I have not read it. Let me see; 
who was it wrote that for me? Why, that rascal Au- 
guste. Je lui laverai la tete!'' 

With Marseilles is associated the name of Emile Zola. 
Before Emile's birth, his father, an Italian, had settled 
there, and had planned extensive port improvements 
that were discarded in favour of the present Bassin de 
la Joliette. About the time that the Count of Monte 
Cristo was paying his last visits to the city the elder 
Zola was practising his profession of civil engineer on 
the Cannebiere. Emile, in his youth, having failed in 
certain scholastic examinations in Paris, tried those 
of Marseilles, but with even more humihating results. 
During the War of 1870 he was virtually adrift in Mar- 
seilles, there running for a short time a war journal which 
was called La Marseillaise. In fiction he made use of 
the city as the background of one of his poorest books, 
*'Les Mysteres de Marseilles." 

To recall by brief mention a dozen novels of varying 
importance, or unimportance, associated with the 
Riviera. Monte Carlo went into the making of W. J. 
Locke's "Septimus." Some of the most entertaining 
chapters of that "best seller" of fifteen or so years ago, 



264 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

"The Lightning Conductor" of C. N. and A. M. Wil- 
liamson, wound — through the medium of motor-car 
construction now ridiculously archaic, round the far in- 
reaching bays of the Cote d'Azur. Readers seeking 
light amusement with a thrill found it in B. E. Steven- 
son's "The Destroyer," which revolved about the de- 
struction of the battleship La Liberie, in the harbour 
of Toulon. The Riviera was in Felix Gras's "The Reds 
of the Midi"; in Maarten Maarten's "Dorothea"; in 
Paul J. L. Heyse's "La Marchesa"; in W. H. Halleck's 
"A Romance of the Nineteenth Century." Then there 
was Archibald Clavering Gunter's "Mr. Barnes of 
New York." Marseilles was in that yarn, and Nice, 
and Monte Carlo, to which the highly coloured villain, 
Count Musso, came as "Satan entering paradise"; and 
the narrative carried the irrepressible hero in approved 
swashbuckling fashion across the Mediterranean to 
rescue Miss Anstruther in the nick of time. 

Of all the spots of the Riviera — Marseilles properly 
speaking does not belong there — the Pilgrim likes Cannes 
the best, and holds it to be the most beautiful. Its 
first literary shadow is that of Guy de Maupassant. 
To this day there juts into the sea, from the Promenade 
de la Croisette the Maupassant "debarcadere," by 
which the novelist made his way to the deck of 
his yacht, the Bel-Ami; and appropriately Cannes 
played its part in the story of the same name. There 
George Duroy hurried in response to the summons of 
Mme. Forestier, and there, by the death bed, the un- 
spoken and unhallowed troth was plighted. It was in 
Cannes that the clouds began to gather for the last time 



MEDITERRANEAN WATERS 265 

about the head of Maupassant himself. To quote from 
the story of his valet, Francois: *'We go out to sea one 
morning by a stiff east wind, and in the afternoon the 
Bel-Ami finds his friend the Ville de Marseille again 
near the Cannes jetty, where my master lands. He 
follows the shore alongside the pleasure boats moored 
near the beach, which resemble a town of little white 
houses. Their masts spring up like miniature spires; 
they might be chimneys. . . . My master still 
walks along the beach, and just before the baths, his 
figure disappears in a garden, bordering the Croisette 
road, of a villa with gilt balconies in a nest of green. 
I can still see the illustrious author putting his hand on 
the bannister and climbing toward the low story, from 
which we can see the horizon. He was going to revisit 
the lady of the pearl-gray dress, always so calm, so 
silent, so enigmatical." 



XVIII. WHERE THE WALL OF STEEL HELD 

In Flanders Field — The Heritage of Disaster — The Fiction 
of the Young Republic — The Napoleonic Era — The War oj 
1870 — The Great Conflict. 

IN FLANDERS field the poppies grow. 
At the time that this chapter was first projected 
the great shadow still was heavy upon the world. 
Thirty-five miles from the old Paris fortifications that 
have appeared so often in the course of this narrative — 
if it may be so called — were the hosts in field gray. By 
ten thousand a day the soldiers of the great republic 
of the western world were disembarking in French ports. 
But was it enough? Could they be a factor in the 
struggle to come, a sufficient aid in averting the great 
stroke designed to destroy the armies of France and 
England and impose upon the world a German peace? 
With hearts heavy, but resolute, we watched and waited. 
Then came the night, the memorable night of July 
17-18 when Marshal Foch gave the word, and through 
the shell-scarred forest seventy thousand men in Amer- 
ican khaki and French horizon-blue moved swiftly and 
silently to strike at dawn the German right flank, and 
crush it by the blow that proved to be the beginning of 
the end. It is a wonderful thing that those who died 
did not die in vain. Yet the subhme pity of it all is that 
it was denied them to live to see with mortal eyes the 
fruit of their sacrifice. 

266 



WHERE THE WALL OF STEEL HELD 267 

In Flanders field the poppies grow. 

Nor is it merely a matter of those who gave their lives 
in the anguish of the great struggle. Across even the 
joyous pages of many of the Frenchmen who wrote in 
the closing years of the nineteenth century there is a 
shadow, faint, yet clearly perceptible. It is the shadow 
of the sadness locked up in the caverns of their hearts, 
the sadness of men who did not need the injunction of 
Gambetta "never to talk, but never to forget." Some- 
thing of the shock of the military disaster and national 
humiliation of 1870, something of the bitterness of 
VAnnee Terrible they carried to the tomb. Daudet 
could write in a gale of gayety of the ludicrous defence 
of Tarascon. But recall "Petit Soldat," and "La 
Derniere Classe," and old Colonel Jouve of "Le Siege 
de Berlin," who perhaps, from somewhere beyond the 
stars, sees the Strasbourg statue in the Place de la 
Concorde stripped of its mourning wreaths. Behind 
the laughter there was ever the heartache. Mau- 
passant's mordant irony in some of his short stories of 
the Franco-Prussian War was so cruel that there were 
readers inclined to question his patriotism. Yet this 
was the man who, when the black night of madness was 
closing in upon him, feverishly fancied that France was 
once more being invaded, and made his servant swear 
to follow him to help defend the eastern frontier. 

It is the same region that witnessed the response of 
the Republican armies to the call of Rouget de Lisle, 

Entendez-vous, dans les campagnes, 
Mugir ces feroces soldats? 



268 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

and the elan that broke the Prussian Guard at Valmy; 
that saw the disorganized and badly generalled troops 
of the Second Empire crumble before the machine- 
like advance of Helmuth Von Moltke; that knew the 
spirit of fortitude and self-sacrifice that enabled the 
Wall of Steel to hold during the four terrible years that 
began on August i, 1914. For centuries to come novel- 
ists are likely to go on building plots in which the 
Great War is involved and finding backgrounds some- 
where along the battle line that extended from the 
Channel to Switzerland. But the concern here is not 
with those books of the future, but with the books that 
have already been written. 

For the first-named period one can hardly do better 
than turn to the works that resulted from that curious 
collaboration known as Erckmann-Chatrian. The 
spirit of Alsace, of the young republic, and of the suc- 
ceeding Napoleonic period is in the novels on which 
Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian wrought 
together for so many years. There are, for example: 
"Madame Therese,'* a tale of a vivandiere and the 
years 1792 and 1793; ''Histoire d'un Consent de 1813" 
(translated as "The Conscript") and its sequel, 
"Waterloo"; "Le Blocus," dealing with the invasion of 
France by the AHies in 1814; and "Histoire d'un Pay- 
san," which runs to several volumes, carrying all the 
way from 1789 to 181 5. In "Waterloo" there is a 
famous account of the great Flanders battle which has 
been described in fiction by so many pens; for example, 
Victor Hugo, in "Les Miserables"; Stendhal, in "La 
Chartreuse de Parme"; and Conan Doyle in "The 



WHERE THE WALL OF STEEL HELD 269 

Great Shadow." Then, for the reflection of the Na- 
poleonic spirit as it was in 1808, when the great em- 
peror, with all Europe crouching at his feet, was at his 
apogee, there are the tales written fifteen years or so 
ago by Georges d'Esparbes, and collected under the 
title *'La Legende de I'Aigle." Adolphe Brisson called 
d'Esparbes "the poet of the Empire," and wrote of "La 
Legende de I'Aigle": 

The Walhalla of war opens, and its mustered heroes are incar- 
nated in new generations of valour. And after the blackening flame 
has died out, in the crash of a ruined country and the embers of a 
continent in conflagration, a phantom passes, alternately a grue- 
some spectre and a prophetic leader, the rush of whose vision makes 
men breathless with awe, and enkindles the immortality of courage. 

The War of 1870 has been depicted on a great canvas 
in Zola's "La Debacle," and in novels by Paul and 
Victor Marguerite. In briefer form, but no less poig- 
nant in tragedy, are such tales as Maupassant's "Boule- 
de-Suif" and "Un Duel," a dozen coxites of Alphonse 
Daudet, and a charming but apparently forgotten book 
by Jules Claretie: "Brichanteau," the story of an old 
actor. On stages of Paris and of provincial towns 
Brichanteau had often played in versions of "The 
Musketeers," and during the Siege there came to him 
the glorious idea of imitating their adventures in prac- 
tical action, of kidnapping the King of Prussia and 
holding him as ransom to ensure the integrity of French 
soil. But against Brichanteau the face of history was 
set, as it had been set against Athos, Porthos, Aramis, 



270 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

and D'Artagnan when they would have saved the head 
of Charles I. 

In the chapter: ''AtLandrecies," of "An Inland Voy- 
age," Stevenson wrote in a prophetic vein: 

In all garrison towns, guard calls, and reveilles, and such like, 
make a fine romantic interlude in civic business. Bugles, and drums, 
and fifes are of themselves most excellent things in nature, and when 
they carry the mind to marching armies and the picturesque vicis- 
situdes of war they stir up something proud in the heart. But in 
the shadow of a town like Landrecies, with little else moving, these 
points of war make a proportionate commotion. Indeed, they were 
the only things to remember. It was just the place to hear the 
round going by at night, with the solid tramp of men marching, and 
the startling reverberations of the drum. It reminded you that 
even this place was a point in the great warfaring system of Europe, 
and might on some future day be ringed about with cannon smoke 
and thunder, and make itself a name among strong towns. 

The fiction of the recent war. The surface has 
hardly been scratched, yet a hundred tales, in a score 
of moods, and in various languages spring instantly to 
mind. There is "The Four Horsemen of the Apoca- 
Iypse"of theSpaniard, BlascoIbanez,with its marvellous 
picture of the tide of German invasion rolling up to the 
Mame, and then reeling back in shattered defeat. 
There are the questionable but undeniably powerful 
"Le Feu" of Henri Barbusse; and Rene Benjamin's 
"Gaspard" and *Te Major Pipe et Son Frere"; and 
Paul Bourget's "The Night Cometh"; and Rene Bois- 
leve*s "Tu n'est Plus Rien"; and Georges Lafond's "La 
Mitrailleuse." There is the "Croire" of Andre Fri- 
bourg, translated as "The Flaming Crucible." There 



WHERE THE WALL OF STEEL HELD 271 

is the collection of short stories that bears the English 
title: "Tales of War Time France," which introduces, 
among others: Alfred Machard, Maurice Level, Fred- 
eric Boutet, Pierre Mille, Madame Lucie Delarue- 
Madrus, Rene Benjamin, and Jean Aicard. Two stories 
of this collection that are likely to endure are *' Under 
Ether," with a definite setting before St. Quentin, and 
"After the War," both by Level. Most of the writers 
mentioned have come to the fore with the war. , 

But it has not been France's war alone. The men 
and women of the pen, of Great Britain and the United 
States, have been keenly alive to its responsibilities and 
its opportunities. Although the story is for the most 
part played out in English village lanes beyond the 
sound of the gun roar, the flaming battle front is every- 
where reflected in the pages of H. G. Wells's "Mr. 
Britling Sees It Through." W. J. Locke's "The Rough 
Road" deals with towns of Flanders or Picardy where 
the presence of British soldiery transformed the Place 
de la Fontaine Into Holborn Circus, the Grande Rue 
into Piccadilly, and the Rue Feuillemaisnil into Regent 
Street. There are Mrs. Humphry Ward's "Missing"; 
and Snaith's "The Coming," and Walpole's "The Dark 
Forest"; and St. John Irvine's "Changing Winds" and 
Lord Dunsany's "Tales of War," and two score more. 

American fiction. The region about Soissons is in 
Richard Harding Davis's stirring "Somewhere in 
France," and two miles from Soissons is the little town of 
Crouy, which figured in Dorothy Canfield's "Home 
Fires in France." There are Edith Wharton's "The 
Mame," and Eleanor Atkinson's "Poilu; a Dog of 



272 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Roubaix"; and Louis Joseph Vance's "The False Faces," 
began on the fighting line; and the Canadian, Ralph Con- 
nor, has written: "The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land.'* 
Tales of heroic sacrifice for the most part, and of the 
land under the blight, but with an underlying note of 
resolute hope and of confidence in the eventual victory. 

Le jour de gloire est arrive. 



XIX. THE OLD-WORLD OPEN ROAD 

The Trail of the Musketeers — The Journey to England — 
Seventeenth-century Inn Names — Crossing the Channel — Old- 
World Hostelries — Wine and Water — Proverbs for Travellers — • 
The Cost of Travel. 

THERE is always difference of opinion. In the 
course of this book there is quotation from Leon- 
ard Merrick in which the creator of Tricotrin 
speaks of the saddening impression derived from meet- 
ing the Musketeers again in their middle-age and " Vi^gt 
Ans Apres." Of another mind was Robert Louis 
Stevenson. ''Upon the crowded noisy life of the long 
tale evening gradually falls; and the lights are extin- 
guished, and the heroes pass away one by one. One by 
one they go, and not a regret embitters their depar- 
ture. . . , Ah, if only when these hours of the long 
shadows fall for us in reality and not in figure, we may 
hope to face them with a mind as quiet! The siege 
guns are firing on the Dutch frontier; and I must say 
adieu for the fifth time to my old comrade fallen on the 
field of glory. Adieu — rather au revoir! Yet a sixth 
time, dearest D'Artagnan, we shall kidnap Monk and 
take horse together for Belle-Isle." Is the reader of 
the party of Stevenson or the party of Merrick? Is 
the old-world open road best suggested to him by the 
youth of twenty, astride of his Rosinante, or by the 



274 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

grizzled, iron veteran who figures in the pages of the 
"Vicomte de Bragelonne?" 

This has been the rambHng record of many rambhng 
pilgrimages. But there is one pilgrimage, perhaps the 
best of all, which the author has not made, except in 
pleasant day dreams. If a kindly fate sometime brings 
these day dreams to reality he will find himself by the 
Porte Saint-Denis in Paris at the steering wheel of a 
purring, high-powered motor car, about to follow (the 
Pilgrim is of the party of Merrick) the old-world open 
road over the route of the most spirited journey in all 
fiction, that made by D'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and 
Aramis, to frustrate the scheming of the great Cardinal 
and to save the honour of Anne of Austria. Certain 
sceptics will probably be inclined to take exception to 
the idea of the motor car, decrying any sort of speed as 
iconoclastic, contending that the romance and open 
road of the old world demand a lagging gait. A lagging 
gait indeed! What but the motor car could have kept 
pace with those iron horsemen? "Look at those clouds 
which flit across the sky," Aramis told Fouquet in the 
twilight tale that Stevenson loved best, **at those swal- 
lows that cut the air. D'Artagnan moves more quickly 
than the cloud or the bird; d'Artagnan is the wind which 
carries them." 

To attempt to follow in reality that first journey of 
the Musketeers would be to discover a France very dif- 
ferent from the France of 1628, where the all-powerful 
Richelieu planted his minions at every turn. So 
the pilgrimage is one that may with satisfaction be 
made at home, be3^ond the magic door, with a seven- 



THE OLD-WORLD OPEN ROAD 275 

teenth-century map, and half a score of volumes dealing 
with the old-world open road and conditions of travel 
and bygone inns as companions. Beyond the old 
barrier, leaving behind the Paris of narrovs^, winding 
streets, the route is plain. All night the four galloped, 
arriving at eight in the morning at Chantilly where 
they descended at the inn known as the "Grand Saint- 
Martin. "There was encountered the stranger who 
selected the conspicuous Porthos as the leader of the ex- 
pedition and delayed him for the purposes of a duel. The 
others, proceeding, stopped for two hours at Beauvais 
to rest their horses and wait for Porthos. A league 
beyond Beauvais they met the group of pretended work- 
men. Aramis, wounded in the brawl, was left to recover 
Crevecceur. At Amiens, at the inn of the "Golden 
Lily," Athos was arrested on a trumped-up charge of 
passing counterfeit money, and D'Artagnan galloped 
on alone to the accomplishment of his mission. Re- 
turning from England, the Gascon followed an entirely 
different route. In accordance with Buckingham's 
directions he landed at Saint-Valery, where he went to 
an inn without name or sign, a sailor's den by the water- 
side, where he uttered the word "Forward." Thence 
to Blagny and to Neuchatel, where at the "Herse d'Or" 
(the Golden Harrow) the password provided him with 
a fresh horse. He was instructed to travel in the gen- 
eral direction of Rouen, but to leave the city on his 
right, and to go to Ecouis, there to descend at the only 
inn of the town, the "Ecu d'Or." From Ecouis he 
proceeded to Pontoise and then on to Paris. 

In the inn names associated with the journey there 



276 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

is the real seventeenth-century ring. According to 
E. S. Bates's "Touring in 1600" — 1600 was twenty- 
five years before the D'Artagnan of Dumas came upon 
the scene of fiction — in a Hst of three hundred and fifty- 
eight different inns mentioned by travellers, the 
"Crown" occurred most frequently (thirty-two times), 
mainly as a result of "Ecu de France" being so favourite 
a name in France. "White Horses" and "Golden 
Lions" seemed to be nearly as popular. Of ecclesiasti- 
cal signs the "Cross" occurred twenty-two times, eleven 
of which were "White"; the "Three Kings," fourteen 
times; 'and the "Red Hat," or its equivalents, the 
"Cardinal's Hat" or the "Cardinal" (seven); but of 
saints there were no more than twenty-five altogether, 
including five of "Our Lady." About the time of the 
active youth of D'Artagnan there was coming in a new 
fashion, apparently set by Paris, of naming inns. That 
was for the purpose of appealing to a special clientele. 
Thus the "Ville de Brissac" catered to Protestants; 
the "Ville de Hambourg" to Germans; while at Calais 
the "Petit Saint- Jean" was a meeting place for 
Scotchmen. 

The Channel crossing figures prominently in all the 
books dealing with the Musketeers. There was D'Artag- 
nan's visit to Buckingham in "Les Trois Mousque- 
taires"; the journey to England made by the four in the 
hope of saving Charles the First; and the return, by 
means of the felucca that was blown up and the open 
boat. And in "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne," the trip 
made by Athos, Comte de la Fere, to find the buried 
miUion, and that of D'Artagnan, as a result of which he 



THE OLD-WORLD OPEN ROAD 277 

succeeded in kidnapping Monk and transporting him 
to Holland in a box. In the seventeenth century the 
passage from Calais to Dover was far from being the 
light matter of the acquaintance of recent generations. 
In 1610 two ambassadors waited at Calais fourteen 
days before they could make a start, and making a start 
by no means implied arriving — at least, not at Dover. 
One traveller, of whom Mr. Bates tells, after a most 
unhappy night, found himself at Nieuport the next 
morning, and had to wait three days before another 
try could be made. Another, who had already sailed from 
Boulogne — after having waited six hours for the tide, 
accomplished two leagues, had been becalmed for nine 
or ten hours, returned to Boulogne by rowboat, and 
posted to Calais — found no wind to takehim across there, 
and had to charter another row-boat at sunset on Fri- 
day, reaching Dover on Monday between four and five 
in the morning. Finishing the crossing by row-boat 
was a very common experience because of the state 
of the harbours. Calais was the better of the two, yet 
it sometimes happened that passengers had to be carried 
ashore one hundred yards or more because not even 
boats could approach. Even a hundred years after the 
heroes of Dumas had passed away the journey was still 
one of hardship. "The Gentleman's Guide in His Tour 
through France," published in 1770, relates that the 
vessels were small, dirty, and ill-appointed, the passage 
a torment, and, if strong head winds blew, impossible. 
Some travellers went all the way by sea from London 
to the Continent. "Upon Change every day is to be 
met with the master of a French trader; whose price to 



278 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Calais, Dunkirk, or Boulogne is only a guinea each passen- 
ger: the passage is commonly made in sixteen or twenty 
hours: this scheme is much more commendable than go- 
ing to Dover; where, should you chance to be wind- 
bound, it will cost you at least half a guinea a day." 

At Calais, Dumas's Joseph Balsamo and the British 
characters of Smollett if they happened to be Paris 
bound, and the hero of Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," 
all probably stayed at Dessein's, whose praises Thack- 
eray was later to sing. That inn — according to the 
eighteenth century "An Essay to Direct and Extend the 
Inquiries of Patriotic Travellers" (there were long- 
winded titles in those days) — was one of the most exten- 
sive in Europe, "with squares, gardens, shops of all 
kinds, work-shops, and a handsome theatre." The 
same authority speaks of an inn at Chalons, with rooms, 
"furnished throughout with silk and damask, the very 
linings of the rooms and bedcovers not excepted." 
Young, in his "Travels in France," proclaimed the 
Hotel Henri IV at Nantes the "finest inn in Europe," 
saying: "it cost 400,000 liv. furnished, and is let at 
14,000 liv. per ann., with no rent for the first year. It 
contains sixty beds for masters and twenty-five stalls 
for horses. Some of the apartments of two rooms, 
very neat, are 6 liv. a day; one good 3 liv,, but for mer- 
chants 5 liv. per diem for dinner, supper, wine and cham- 
ber." On the other hand, Young recorded that at 
Moulins, in the Loire region, he went to the "Beauti- 
ful Image" but found it so bad that he left it and went 
to the "Golden Lion" which was worse; and that at 
Saint-Girons, in the Basses-Pyrenees, a town of four 



THE OLD-WORLD OPEN ROAD 279 

or five thousand Inhabitants, he was forced to put up at 
a pubhc-house undeserving the name of inn. "A 
wretched hag, the demon of beasdiness, presides there. 
I laid, not rested, in a chamber over a stable. It could 
give me but two stale eggs. But the inns all the way 
from Nimes are wretched, except at Lodeve, Ganges, 
Carcassonne, and Mirepoix." 

To revert to the days of the Musketeers. **Les Voya- 
geurs en France" tells of a traveller, who, in 163 1, went 
through the country on foot and on horseback; often 
going out of the beaten track. He noted: "In certain 
villages, in certain towns even In the centre of France, 
the inns lack everything. One can hardly find bread 
and a fire. Beds are wanting. The Musketeers, thanks 
perhaps to the length of their swords, usually managed 
to command material hospitality, especially in the mat- 
ter of wine. We are astonished at the extent of the 
potations of Athos, above all at that debauch at the 
''Golden Lily" of Amiens, when the wine fumes moved 
him to the narration of the story of his marriage in early 
life to the woman so soon to reappear upon the scene as 
Milady, Countess de Winter. Remember, in the con- 
nection, that outside of Spain and Turkey, Europeans 
of the period thought water unhealthy, a French inn 
breakfast consisted of a glass of wine and just a mouth- 
ful of bread, and travellers, as often as not, cleaned 
their teeth with wine. Nor is there anything astonish- 
ing in the care with which D'Artagnan, or Chicot the 
Jester at an earlier period examined their surroundings 
when they happened to be spending the night at a 
strange inn. Among the proverbs impressed upon 



28o THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

persons about to travel in the seventeenth century was 
one: "In an inn bedroom which contains big pictures, 
look behind the latter to see if they do not conceal a 
secret door, or a window." 

The good Dumas loved the five-franc piece, loved 
it for the pleasure of scattering it to the four winds. 
Consequently the Musketeers of his fancy were gener- 
ously endowed with spendthrift qualities, and were con- 
tinually confronted with the problem of finding money 
for new equipment or for the expenses of a projected 
journey. D'Artagnan did not disdain graciously to 
accept a roll of gold from the hand of Louis XIII. The 
purchasing power of money in the early half of the 
seventeenth century may be roughly estimated as ten 
times that of the present day, or five times that of five 
or six years ago. Yet despite this disparity the cost 
of travel was greater than it is now in the times of the 
railways. Following the open road by coach, horse 
hire alone cost from three to ten sous a mile; there were 
plenty of highway tolls; and in crossing a ferry the 
ferryman occasionally made the passengers pay what- 
ever he pleased by collecting fares in the middle of the 
river. It is quite unlikely, however, that this particular 
form of extortion was ever practised at the expense of 
Messieurs les Mousquetaires. 




XX. MY OLD EUROPE 

"Y OLD Europe! Shall I ever know it again as 
I first knew it in the morning of life ? And yet, 
as I write, there comes to mind a certain pas- 
sage in the "Peter Ibbetson" of George Du Maurier, a 
passage about "the faint, scarcely perceptible ghost-Hke 
suspicion of a scent — a mere nostalgic fancy, compound, 
generic, and all-embracing." The eyes may never 
see the old Europe more as they saw it once, but a single 
whiff of the soft coal which most nostrils find so dis- 
tasteful, and the years drop away, and there is an Amer- 
ican boy of eight, who had hitherto known no coal 
smell other than that of anthracite, making his way 
down the gang plank from the deck of the old Guion 
Liner Wyoming after a thirteen-day sea journey, to the 
wharves and streets and the murky, bituminous laden 
air of Liverpool. "Were the two boys, riding by in a 
carriage of such splendid proportions, Princes?" That 
was his first eager old-world question. He had heard 
and read of princes in his own democratic land, and the 
word appealed vividly to the imagination. 

That was the beginning of the acquaintance, renewed 
almost every year thereafter during the impressionable 
teens. It was a Europe of startling innovations, of 
new and iconoclastic ideals, of radical departures from 
the customs of the "good old times" to those who 

281 



282 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

viewed it through the eyes of maturity. But it was a 
Europe very different from the one we contemplate in 
Anno Domini 1919, the one which we are all hoping to 
revisit ere many years have passed, the one which the 
writer of these Hnes last saw in its stress and turmoil a 
brief two years ago. 

If in the highly commendable resolution to eschew 
for the rest of our lives everything of late enemy origin 
a single exception should be made, the writer's impulse 
would be to speak for those familiar red-bound books, 
to which several generations of Americans have gone 
about clinging, that bear the imprint of a publishing 
house of Leipsic. Undoubtedly treachery long skulked 
behind the respectable name, and agents travelling for 
the ostensible purpose of keeping the books "up-to- 
date," and seeing that starred hotels and restaurants 
continued to deserve the distinction conferred upon 
them, were in reality engaged in the more sinister busi- 
ness of selecting gun sites for Prussian batteries in 
Northern France, and making notes on inadequately 
defended beaches of East Anglia. But in the matter 
of original authorship it was usually what might be 
called an Entente affair. Englishmen compiled the 
books on "London and Environs," "Great Britain and 
Ireland," "United States and Canada"; Frenchmen 
wrote those dealing with "Paris," "Northern France," 
"Southern France," and the southern countries. 

Take up one of those books bearing a date of the 
'eighties to realize the changes that thirty years have 
wrought in a Europe that we have regarded as unchang- 
ing. If the book at hand happens to deal with London, 



MY OLD EUROPE 283 

it is a London without a Tube system, a Savoy Hotel, 
a Hotel Cecil, or any of half a dozen new and familiar 
hostelries, and the maps will show old streets with 
names that recall Dickens where the broad Kingsway 
now runs. Paris is a Paris without an Eiffel Tower, 
to mention the first monument which the travel- 
ler discerns when approaching la ville lumiere. Prep- 
arations for the transatlantic journey involve consider- 
ation of the merits of the Inman Line, the Guion Line, 
the American Steamship Company, the National 
Steamship Company, the State Line. It is almost like 
picking up one of those quaint old-time guide books to 
the United States, embellished by wood cuts, in which 
the traveller in New York is advised to stay at the 
Astor House, or the American Hotel, opposite the City 
Hall Park; or the United States Hotel in Fulton Street, 
which had formerly been Holt's; or Florence's at Broad- 
way and Walker Street, described as a "new and elegant 
establishment"; and when, having done with Man- 
hattan, and bound for Philadelphia, is directed to em- 
bark at Battery Place on the boat for South Amboy, 
thence continuing the journey over the rails of the Cam- 
den and Amboy. 

But this is the narrative, not of old guide books, but 
of early impressions. How curious those early impres- 
sions are! What trivial, inconsequential, yet delightful 
associations the name of a city seen in the flush of first 
youth awakens in the memory. Rome! I see a toy 
shop in a street the name of which is long since for- 
gotten, and a window in which were displayed boxes 
of fascinating lead soldiers, shining in their uniforms of 



284 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Italian green. Or again I see a bit of the Forum, or the 
warm sunhght on the Palatine Hill, or in St. Peter's, 
near the Altar, a painting depicting Saint Michael and 
the Dragon that haunted me for months — to this day 
I am ignorant of the title of the picture and the name of 
the painter — or Michael Angelo's "The Last Judg- 
ment" in the Sistine Chapel. Venice! Leaving the 
railway station at five o'clock in the morning after a 
night ride from Florence, the journey by gondola to 
the hotel facing the Grand Canal, the quaint warning 
call of the boatman when approaching the street cor- 
ners, and afterward the pigeons in the Piazza of St. 
Mark. Como! Many-hued lizards scampering over 
the warm walls in the sunshine. Basle! A hotel 
known as "The Three Kings," and again fascinating 
lead soldiers, th s time in the uniforms of the Swiss 
Republic. Geneva! A narrow street one block back 
from the lake front, where the windows of the shops 
glittered with snow-covered toy chalets. 

In the case of Rome, Venice, and Como, those first 
impressions have been the only impressions. In re- 
visiting cities after the lapse of many years there is at 
times something almost uncanny. Take the Swiss 
capital of Berne. I saw it first in 1887 with the eyes of 
thirteen. For thirty years I carried it in vivid memory. 
I felt that my knowledge of it as it actually was had 
never departed. I had but to shut my eyes to see the 
quaint streets with the flanking Lauhen^ the fountains, 
the curious clocks, and the winding river far below. 
Above all I had visualized the bear-pit, where the city's 
patron bruins roll in well-nourished comfort, and gobble 



MY OLD EUROPE 2S5 

the buns that are tossed to them over the railing above. 
Then, in the spring of 191 7, I saw Berne again. With 
six other men of the American Commission for Belgium 
and the North of France I had been taken through a 
Germany — ^where eyes were shining with the "Hymn 
of Hate" — apparently destined for detention somewhere 
in the Black Forest. But Berne; it was not the same 
city. Strangest of all, the bear-pit was found to be on 
the other side of the river Aar. But there is always the 
city of dreams to blur and confuse the memory. At 
times I am at a loss to determine whether a street or a 
view has been seen with eyes asleep or eyes awake. 
There are corners of New York that I know never had 
tangible existence. There is a wall of Paris which I 
have long sought in vain yet which is perfectly familiar 
to me. 

More mature impressions, the impressions of the 
teens, were the first impressions of the towns which, 
during the long years of strife, have been flaming in the 
reports from the western battle front. Troyes, Chalons- 
sur-Marne, Rheims, Soissons, Saint-Quentin. The 
names conjure up in memory hotels built round court- 
yards, and bearing signs of delightful old-world 
flavour — "The Red Lion," "The Lion of Flanders," 
"The Three Kings," "The Swan," "The Great Stag," 
"The Golden Cross," "The White Cross." In these 
hotels there were little reading rooms with furniture 
upholstered in black leather, where one found well 
thumbed and carefully preserved French illustrated 
papers depicting the sorrows of the "terrible year," 
woodcuts showing the harsh passing of the bearded 



286 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

and helmeted Prussians, and the desolated countryside. 
Then, ver}'^ early in the morning, one was awakened by 
a bugle call and the sound of tramping feet, and looking 
out the window, one saw passing in the street below 
red-trousered young soldiers of France on the march. 
Not those men, but the sons of those men were to hold 
at Verdun and the Marne. They were not known as 
poilus then; the word had not yet been found, or if 
found, was not in common use. France loved them 
as her little piou-pious, and there was a gaudy illus- 
trated paper, devoted to their interests, with the title, 
Le Petit Piou-Pioti, which to the eyes of youth was 
irresistibly comic. 

Tours and the banks of the Loire, and, in a word, 
all of fair Touraine, have come to mean to me in later 
years the associations of Honore de Balzac, his Eugenie 
Grander, his Lily of the Valley, his Gaudissart, his 
Abbe Birotteau; or Scott's Quentin Durward riding, as 
Stevenson has phrased it, *'midnightly through the 
gibbet-and-gypsy-haunted forest." But to the boy of 
nine who first saw Tours neither the name of "The Wiz- 
ard of the North" nor that of the author of the "Com- 
edie Humaine" had any meaning. His memory was of 
certain good-natured French officers of the garrison 
who were in the habit of dining at the hotel, and who, 
in the garden courtyard after dinner, permitted the 
little American boy to play with their swords, and 
hlagued him in funny English, to his delight and their 
own. Then there was a town on the banks of the Seine, 
a few miles from Paris, called Bougival. It was the 
scene of a tournament as spirited to the vision as Scott's 



MY OLD EUROPE 287 

passage at arms in the lists of Ashby de la Zouche was 
later to prove to the imagination. Boats propelled by 
sturdy rowers were the steeds; spears with cushioned 
pads at the end, the weapons. The Brian de Bois Guil- 
bert of the Bougival encounter, champion of cham- 
pions, a huge man, the redoubtable butcher of La 
Jonchere, was dethroned, tumbled backward into the 
water by an unknown youth who, to the amazed on- 
lookers, seemed almost slightly built. Like the Temp- 
lar, the butcher of La Jonchere received a second 
chance, only to go forth to a downfall even more crush- 
ing than the first. This time it was not the stalwart 
Brian, worsted but not disgraced, falling before the 
lance of the Disinherited Knight, but the Hospitalier, 
hurled from his saddle like a stone from a catapult. 

Other memories of Bougival. An old inn on the 
river bank, with panels done in payment for breakfasts 
and dinners by impecunious painter men, some of whom 
afterward became famous, and were numbered among 
"toutes les gloires de la France'. Behind the inn, though 
this is a memory of years somewhat later, a garden 
with many tables and gravelled paths, and great 
glass tanks in which little fish were swimming. The 
specialty of the house was its goujons frits. In response 
to an order the white-aproned chef scooped from a tank 
a bowl full of the wriggling creatures and transferred 
them to the sizzling pan. Far travelled the fame of 
those goujons frits. Americans came to the little inn on 
the Seine bank, and there, on Sunday evenings, one 
saw familiar faces, faces encountered in the courtyard 
of the Grand Hotel, or in the Continental, or at the 



288 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

Cafe de la Paix, or interrogating the mail clerk in the 
banking house in the Boulevard Haussmann. But the 
painter men, whether they had become " gloires de la 
France* or not, had all departed. 

It was pleasant travelHng in my old Europe, or at all 
events it seems so after all the years. First there was 
the transatlantic journey by the Bretagne, or the ill- 
starred Bourgogney or the Normandie, the steadiest 
liner of her day, or the Gascogne, or the St. Germain, 
or the old France, all of the C. G. T., or by the Servia 
or Aurania of the Cunard, or the Arizona or Alaska of 
the Guion. Occasionally, before the Great War, you 
heard of one of these vessels, usually renamed, and 
plying between Europe and some South American port. 
Once they were the aristocratic greyhounds of the sea. 
Ashore, the American dining car had not yet been in- 
troduced on continental railways. The midday or even- 
ing repast was contained in the wicker basket, which, 
telegraphed for ahead, was thrust into the train com- 
partment in the course of some three-minute stop. 
The name *' Dijon," or "Rouen," or "Orleans" meant 
not Feudal history, but your dinner. Ah, that wicker 
basket, with its contents to be consumed at leisure as 
the train wound over Norman hill or through vineyard 
of Burgundy! The half poulet roti, which was so much 
better than roast chicken; the filet of beef, the hors 
d^ceuvres, the forearm of bread; the green almonds, 
for which one burrowed and excavated; the half bottle 
of red or white wine. Degenerate descendants of those 
wicker baskets of yesteryear may still occasionally 
be found in the world. . I encountered several such in the 



MY OLD EUROPE 289 

spring of 1917 in the course of the thirty-hour journey 
under war conditions between Cannes and Bordeaux. 
But the real wicker baskets of my old Europe belong as 
much to the irrevocable past as the banquet of Cedric 
the Saxon in the halls of Rotherwood. 

Then there was the Enghsh and American pension 
in the Rue de CHchy of Paris where the months ran 
into the years. I can see it now; the long dining room; 
the salon, where Mrs. Lippincott recited, and Maud 
Powell, then a student, played the violin, and Madame 
told of prices in the Paris markets during the Siege; 
and the garden, where there were round tin-topped 
tables on which a small boy could lie at full length, 
contemplating the shapes assumed by the clouds as 
they floated lazily across the sky. In an adjoining 
garden a Frenchman took his daily fencing lesson, 
and the air rang with the stamp of feet and the clash 
of the buttoned foils. But all was not idleness. There 
was an adored sister who pounded the French verb 
into my head with a loving persistence that makes it 
exceedingly strange that the French verb in question 
still remains a baffling problem. There were days in a 
private school in the same street, and in a public school 
in the near-by Rue Blanche. In the latter institution 
I recall that I stood sixtieth in a class of sixty-one, and 
retain a haunting impression that the sixty-first boy 
was somehow defective. I was not alone there in the 
matter of nationality. My American companion was 
a brother of Maud Powell, three years older than my- 
self. In memory he seems always to have been fighting 
with a gigantic young Negro from one of the French 



290 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

West Indies. In the fiction that I have since read 
English-speaking boys in French schools are always 
addressed by their French comrades as "sacre Godems." 
With me memory holds no such endearing epithet. 

Once in the pension there was great excitement. 
Everyone had been reading a novel by Henry James as 
it appeared in serial form. The most exciting part of 
the story — if allusion to a tale of Henry James may be 
made in such a form — had been reached, and eager eyes 
were watching for the appearance of the forthcoming 
number of the magazine containing it. When it ar- 
rived it contained no new instalment, for the story had 
been finished in the previous issue, and no one had 
realized it. I wonder just which novel of James that 
was. My impression once was that it was "Daisy 
Miller," but it could not well have been. It is an early 
memory in the world of books; belonging to the same 
period as my first literary memory. In the salon of 
the pension, in a bonnet and dress of the 'sixties, and 
carrying a caricature of a cotton umbrella, appeared 
the lady whom we knew personally as Mrs. Lippincott. 
From her own writings she read or recited, for to a 
former generation she was widely known under her 
pen name of "Grace Greenwood." 

Perhaps it was the flavour of a literary atmosphere 
imparted to the pension by the presence of Grace 
Greenwood that was responsible for a misdemeanour of 
which everyone is at some time or other guilty, the 
childhood essay in authorship. Or perhaps that ramb- 
ling screed of moving armies and the clash of battle was 
born in the fever of a bitter yet justifiable national dis- 



MY OLD EUROPE 291 

like, which has never abated, and which never will abate. 
There were in the pension two Germans of perhaps 
twenty-five or thirty, who delighted, behind doors and 
when no one was looking, in pinching cruelly little 
American boys. Long after I saw those Prussian faces 
in nightmares, wreathed in joyous leer at the spectacle 
of pain inflicted. Years later I was to see similar faces, 
behind the German lines in Belgium — faces of officers 
of his Imperial Majesty, Wilhelm the Second — who 
lined railway station platforms to watch the ghastly 
return of the chomeursy and to mock the heart-rending 
cries of the women: "OA, mon perely Oh, mon mart!, 
Ohy monfils!" 

Pour la revanche^ with those pinches still tingling, 
I flung on paper into the field alHed armies under the 
flags of the United States, the British Empire, and the 
French Republic. Gleefully, and under my own leader- 
ship of course, I hurled them against the hordes of the 
Vaterland, and very soon the goose step changed to 
the scamper of wild flight. In that war the Star- 
Spangled Banner, the Tricolor, and the Union Jack 
went right on to Berlin, and the Thiergarten echoed 
with the delightful strains of ''Yankee Doodle." Per- 
haps it was a sense of noblesse oblige that prompted the 
author to permit the soldiers of Great Britain and 
France to join in the dance. There was a rhyme of 
those days: 

Old Boney was a Frenchman, a soldier brave and true, 

But Wellington did lick him on the field of Waterloo, 

But braver still and greater far and tougher than shoe leather, 

Was Washington the man who could have Hcked them both together. 



292 THE PARIS OF THE NOVELISTS 

which little American boys In Europe were cautioned 
to use with discretion lest it jar upon sensitive French 
and British ears. 

Then came the day when, walking by an elder's 
side along the boulevard, a stout short old gentleman 
was pointed out to me. He was riding on the imperiale 
of a passing omnibus, and he carried an umbrella. 
**That," said my mentor, "Is Monsieur Victor Hugo." 
Was \0. Had the fugitive glimpse been the glimpse 
of another I should be to-day the first to be frankly 
sceptical. But at the time, even though the name 
meant little, I was perfectly convinced that the short 
stout man of the omnibus was Victor Hugo. And 
looking backward it seems somehow that it would be 
treason and ingratitude to harbour even the shadow 
of a doubt. 

A few years later. The beach of the Norman town 
of Etretat, which stretches along the sea between the 
Falalse d'Aval and the Falaise d'Amont. At the morn- 
ing bathing hour the eyes of all those Idling on the 
sands, were they French, English, or American, turned 
in the direction of a strongly built man with an air of 
aristocratic aloofness. It was Guy de Maupassant. 
Later the memory was to mean much to me. He was 
then in the full flood of his powers and his fame. But 
he had just vv^ritten "Le Horla," which first suggested 
the gathering shadows of the madness that was so soon 
to blight and extinguish him. 

To what babbling lengths those memories might be 
carried! Ah, my old Europe! I shall never see you 
again as I saw you in the morning of life. But in mus- 



MY OLD EUROPE 293 

ing on you, and in repeating over and over the name, 
it seems as if "the air is full of ballad notes, borne 
out of long ago." 



THE END 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Aicard, J., 271 
Anstey, F., 120 
Atkinson, E., 271 
Augier, E., 108 



Connolly, J. B., 6 
Conrad, J., j, 255 
Constant, B., 123 
Cooper, J. F., 114, 179 
Couperus, L., 10 
Crawford, F. M., 5, 6, 185 



B 



Balzac, H. de, 39, 60 seq., 77, 80, 86, 

108, 109, 114, 146, 232 seq., 286 
Barbusse, H., 270 
Bates, E. S., 277 
Benjamin, R., 270 
Bennett, A., 125, 140 seq. 
Beranger, 39, 218 
Blanche, Dr., 175 
Boisgobey, F. de, 89 
Bourget, P., 270 
Brisson, A., 15 
Bronte, C, 12 
Brookfield, W. H., 34 
Brookfield, Mrs., 34, 164 
Browning, R., 44 
BuUen, F., 15 

Bulwer-Lytton, E., 10, 72, 124 
Burnett, F. H., 5 
Byron, Lord, 12 



D 



Daudet, A., 92 seq., 146, 150, 164, 

205, 206 seq., 240, 241 seq., 255, 

267 
Davis, R. H., 5, 9, 76, 186, 256, 271 
Dawson, A. J., 9 
Delaroche, P., 63 
Dickens, C., 5, 9, 40 seq., 103, 125, 

164, 255 
Disraeli, B., 87, 124 
Doyle, A. C, 8, 9, 89, 125, 131 seq., 

212, 268 
Drouet, J., 21 
Dumas, A., 10, 12, 20, 23, 35, 43, 45 

seq., 80, 108, 146, 252 seq. 
Dumas ;?/j, 46, 108 
Du Maurier, G., 28, 30, 108, 115 

seq., 200 seq., 206, 281 
Dunsany, Lord, 271 



Canfield, D., 271 
Carlyle, T., 40 
Carryll, G. W., 191 
Cezanne, P., 147 
Chambers, R. W., 187 
Champfleury, 11 1 
Chateaubriand, 43 
Cherbuliez, V., 203 
Claretie, J., 269 
Collins, W., 44, 80 



Erckmann-Chatrian, 268 
Esparbes, G. d', 269 



Fielding, H., 8 

Flaubert, G., 89, 146, 167, 220 seq. 
Forster, J., 40, 43 
France, A., 198 

Francois (Maupassant's valet), 43 
seq., 212 



297 



298 INDEX 



Franklin, M., 56 
Fribourg, A., 270 
Froude, 40 
Funck-Bientano, 62 



Gaboriau, E., 89 seq., 200 

Gambetta, 66, 105 

Gautier, T., 43. 73. 87, 88, loS, 158, 

229 
Gavarni, 73, 98 
Gerome, 106, 123 
Girardin, E. de, 44 
Glasgow, E., loi 
Goncourt, E. de, 150 
Goncourt, J. de, 150 
Gras, F., 264 
Greenwood, G., 286 
Guizot, 35 

Gunter, A. C, 181 seq., 264 
Gyp, 213 



H 



Hallam, H., 34 
Halleck, W. H., 264 
Hamilton, C, 126, 129 
Harris, F., 143 
Hayward, A., 32 
Henry, O., 4, 193 
Heyse, P., 264 
Howard, B. W., 238 
Howells, W. D., 4, 186 
Hughes, R., 186 

Hugo, v., 10, 12, 13 seq., 35, 39, 43, 
57, 77, 108, 129, 146, 239, 292 



Ibanez, V. B., 270 
Irvine, St. J., 271 
Irving, W., 177 



Janin, J., in, 158 
Johnson, 0., 186, 190 



Karr, A., 43, 158, 213 

Keats, 29 

King, B., 186 

Kipling, R., 3, 6, 7, 29, 125 seq. 

Kock, P. de, 86 seq. 



Lafond, G., 270 

Lamartine, 43 

Leroux, G., 89 

Level, M., 271 

Locke, W. J., 125, 144 seq., 202, 263 

Loti, P., 239 

M 

McCutcheon, G. B., 4 

McFee, W., 6 

Maartens, M., 10, 264 

Maeterlinck, M., 10 

Maquet, A., 47, 262 

Marguerite, P., 269 

Marguerite, V., 269 

Martin, B. E., 17, 26, 52 

Matthews, B., 85 

Maupassant, G. de, 141, 150, 163 

seq., 196, 199, 205, 212, 213 seq., 

219, 264^292 
Maynial, E., 172 
Mendes, C., 169 
Meredith, G., 125 
Meredith, O., 125 
Merrick, L., 125, 135 seq., 202, 226, 

273 
Mery, 35, 158 
Mitchell, S. W., 186 
MofFett, C, 191 
Murger, H., 108 seq. 
Musset, A. de, 39, 108, 123 



Jacobs, W. W., 6 N 

James, H., 117, 183, 186, 213, 215, 

290 Nadaud, G., 228 

James, G. P. R., 124 Nodier, C., 123 



INDEX 



299 



Norris, C, 192 
Norris, F., 191, 192 
Noyes, A., 5 

o 

Ouida (Louise de la Ramee), 10, 217 



Payne, J. H., 177 
Phillpotts, E., 8 
Foe, E. A., 89, 152, 179 seq. 
Prevost, Abbe, 229 

R 

Rabelais, 200 
Reade, C., 10 
Robertson, M., 6 
Rousseau, J. J., 72 



Sainte-Beuve, 108 

Sand, G., 30, 44, 64, 80, 238 

Sandeau, J., 64 

Sardou, V., 16 

SchefFer, A., 44 

Scott, W., 36, 124, 185, 234, 286 

Scribe, E., 35,44 

Shaw, G. B., 141 

Smith, F. B., 191 

Sonnichsen, A., 6 

Stendhal, 236, 268 

Sterne, L., 124 

Stevenson, B. E., 5, 264 

Stevenson, R. A. M., 126, 130 

Stevenson, R. L., 125, 126 seq., 204, 

270, 273 
Stevenson, Mrs., 131 
Street, J., 29, 188 



Sue, E., 43, 77 seq., 1 14 
Swinburne, A. C, 168 



Tarkington, N. B., 8, 45, 188 seq., 

202, 218 
Terrail, P. de., 89 
Thackeray, W. M., 5, 28 seq., 47, 

48, 72, 125, 133, 164, 204, 210, 211 
Trollope, A., 9, 37 
Turgenieff, 150 



Vance, L. J., 5, 190, 272 
Van Dam, A., 79 
Van Saanan, M. L., 239 
Verlaine, P., 107 
Vigny, A. de, 20 
Villemessant, H., 252 
Villon, F., 107, no, 129 
Vizetelly, E., 147 
Voltaire, 71 

w 

Walpole, H., 271 
Ward, Mrs. H., 271 
Wells, H. G., 271 
Werdet, 65 

Wharton, E., 186, 271 
Whistler, J. M., 116 
Williamson, A. M., 5, 264 
Williamson, C. N., 5, 264 
Wilson, H. L., 187 



Zola, E., 95, 146 seq., 169, 174, 263, 
269 




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